1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
10 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
11 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
13 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
14 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
15 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
16 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
17 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
20 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
21 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
22 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
24 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
25 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
28 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
30 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
31 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
33 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
34 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
35 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
37 ** Changes in behavior
39 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
40 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
41 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
42 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
46 realpath: print resolved file names.
49 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
53 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
54 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
55 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
57 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
58 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
60 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
61 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
65 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
66 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
68 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
69 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
70 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
71 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
73 ** Changes in behavior
75 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
76 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
77 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
81 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
82 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
83 only .tar.xz files is enough.
86 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
90 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
91 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
92 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
94 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
95 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
97 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
98 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
99 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
100 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
101 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
103 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
104 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
105 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
106 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
107 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
108 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
109 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
110 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
112 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
113 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
115 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
116 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
118 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
119 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
121 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
122 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
123 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
125 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
126 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
127 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
130 ** Changes in behavior
132 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
133 when -v or -c specified.
135 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
136 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
140 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
141 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
142 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
143 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
144 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
146 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
147 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
148 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
150 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
151 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
152 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
153 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
154 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
155 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
156 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
158 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
159 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
160 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
164 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
165 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
167 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
170 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
171 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
173 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
174 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
176 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
177 For example `shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2` no longer exhausts memory.
179 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
181 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
185 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
186 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
188 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
191 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
195 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
196 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
198 ** Changes in behavior
200 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
201 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
202 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
203 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
204 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
205 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
207 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
208 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
209 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
213 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
216 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
220 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
221 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
222 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
224 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
225 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
228 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
229 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
230 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
232 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
233 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
235 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
236 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
238 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
241 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
246 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
247 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
248 processed portion thereof.
250 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
251 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
253 ** Changes in behavior
255 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
256 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
257 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
259 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
260 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
261 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
263 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
264 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
266 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
267 Use --preserve-context instead.
269 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
272 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
276 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
277 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
278 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
279 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
280 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
282 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
283 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
285 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
286 reject file names invalid for that file system.
288 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
293 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
294 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
295 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
296 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
297 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
298 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
299 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
300 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
302 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
303 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
304 the same number of fields are output for each line.
306 ** Changes in behavior
308 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
309 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
310 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
313 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
317 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
318 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
319 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
322 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
326 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
327 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
329 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
330 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
332 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
333 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
335 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
336 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
337 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
338 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
340 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
341 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
343 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
344 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
345 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
347 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
349 ** Changes in behavior
351 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
352 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
353 to the number of available processors.
357 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
360 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
364 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
365 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
366 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
367 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
369 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
370 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
371 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
373 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
374 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
376 ** Changes in behavior
378 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
379 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
381 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
382 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
383 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
384 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
385 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
386 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
388 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
389 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
390 the same way as the others.
393 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
397 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
398 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
399 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
401 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
402 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
404 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
405 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
406 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
408 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
409 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
411 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
412 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
414 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
415 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
416 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
418 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
419 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
420 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
421 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
425 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
426 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
428 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
431 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
432 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
434 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
436 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
437 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
438 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
440 ** Changes in behavior
442 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
443 rather than its aliased target.
445 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
446 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
447 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
449 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
450 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
451 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
452 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
453 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
454 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
455 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
456 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
458 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
460 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
462 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
463 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
466 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
467 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
468 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
469 control like taskset for example.
471 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
473 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
474 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
475 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
476 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
477 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
478 includes %C when context information is available.
480 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
481 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
482 rather than a file system attribute.
484 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
485 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
486 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
487 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
489 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
490 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
491 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
493 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
494 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
495 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
498 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
502 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
503 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
505 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
507 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
510 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
511 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
512 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
513 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
515 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
516 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
521 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
522 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
524 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
525 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
526 duration after the initial signal was sent.
528 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
529 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
530 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
531 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
532 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
533 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
534 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
535 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
536 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
538 ** Changes in behavior
540 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
541 sequence when it would be a no-op.
543 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
544 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
547 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
551 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
552 of available processors, which may not have been the case
553 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
554 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
558 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
559 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
561 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
562 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
563 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
564 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
566 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
567 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
568 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
571 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
575 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
576 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
577 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
579 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
580 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
581 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
583 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
584 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
586 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
587 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
588 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
589 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
591 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
592 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
593 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
595 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
596 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
597 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
598 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
600 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
601 renamed-aside and then recreated.
602 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
604 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
605 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
606 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
607 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
609 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
610 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
611 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
613 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
614 processes will not intersperse their output.
615 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
618 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
622 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
623 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
625 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
626 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
628 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
629 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
630 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
631 the presence of the empty string argument.
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
634 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
635 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
636 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
637 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
639 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
640 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
642 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
643 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
644 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
646 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
647 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
648 and with a malicious user on the same system
649 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
650 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
653 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
657 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
658 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
659 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
661 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
662 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
663 offending directory and all "contents."
665 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
666 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
667 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
669 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
670 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
671 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
673 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
674 processes will not intersperse their output.
675 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
676 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
678 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
679 output the name of the file to stdout.
680 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
682 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
683 call fails with errno == EACCES.
684 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
686 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
687 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
690 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
691 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
692 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
694 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
695 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
696 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
697 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
698 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
699 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
701 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
702 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
703 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
704 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
706 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
707 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
709 ** Changes in behavior
711 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
712 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
713 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
714 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
715 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
717 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
718 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
719 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
720 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
722 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
724 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
725 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
726 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
727 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
728 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
732 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
736 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
737 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
739 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
740 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
742 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
743 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
744 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
746 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
747 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
750 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
754 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
755 when the source file doesn't have write access.
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
758 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
759 to accommodate leap seconds.
760 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
762 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
763 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
764 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
766 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
768 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
769 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
770 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
772 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
773 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
774 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
775 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
776 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
780 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
781 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
782 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
783 directory or a symlink to a directory.
785 ** Changes in behavior
787 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
788 environment variable is set.
790 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
791 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
792 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
796 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
797 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
798 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
799 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
801 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
802 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
803 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
804 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
808 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
809 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
810 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
812 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
813 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
814 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
815 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
816 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
817 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
820 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
821 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
824 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
828 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
829 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
830 and libraries tested at configure time.
831 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
833 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
834 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
836 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
837 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
839 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
840 printing a summary to stderr.
841 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
843 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
844 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
845 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
847 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
848 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
850 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
851 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
852 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
853 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
855 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
856 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
857 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
858 which is relatively unusual.
859 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
861 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
862 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
863 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
864 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
865 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
866 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
867 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
871 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
872 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
873 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
874 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
875 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
879 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
880 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
882 ** Changes in behavior
884 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
885 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
886 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
887 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
888 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
891 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
895 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
896 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
898 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
899 before data copying has started.
901 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
902 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
904 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
905 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
906 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
907 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
909 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
910 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
911 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
912 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
914 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
919 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
920 for its standard streams.
922 ** Changes in behavior
924 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
925 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
926 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
927 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
928 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
929 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
931 ** Deprecated options
933 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
934 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
938 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
940 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
941 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
944 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
946 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
947 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
949 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
950 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
953 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
957 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
958 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
959 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
960 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
962 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
963 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
964 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
965 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
966 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
971 make check: two tests have been corrected
975 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
976 inherited from gnulib.
979 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
983 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
984 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
985 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
986 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
988 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
989 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
991 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
993 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
994 systems without xattr support.
996 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
997 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
998 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1000 ** Changes in behavior
1002 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1003 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1004 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1005 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1007 ** Improved robustness
1009 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1010 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1011 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1012 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1013 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1014 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1015 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1016 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1017 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1021 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1022 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1024 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1025 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1026 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1027 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1028 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1031 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1035 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1036 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1037 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1041 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1042 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1043 data was read, or on process exit.
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1046 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1047 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1048 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1049 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1051 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1052 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1053 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1054 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1056 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1057 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1059 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1060 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1062 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1063 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1064 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1066 ** Changes in behavior
1068 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1069 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1070 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1072 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1073 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1075 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1076 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1077 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1080 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1084 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1086 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1087 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1088 install: Never copies xattrs
1090 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1091 from overwriting any existing destination file
1093 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1094 mode where this feature is available.
1096 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1097 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1098 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1099 do not modify the destination at all.
1101 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1103 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1107 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1108 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1110 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1112 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1113 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1115 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1116 processing the first file name
1118 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1119 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1120 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1121 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1123 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1124 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1126 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1127 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1130 ** Changes in behavior
1132 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1133 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1135 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1136 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1137 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1139 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1140 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1142 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1144 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1145 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1146 is still marked with a '+'.
1149 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1153 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1154 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1158 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1159 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1160 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1161 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1162 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1163 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1165 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1166 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1168 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1169 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1171 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1173 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1174 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1175 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1177 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1178 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1180 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1181 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1182 used to factor large numbers.
1184 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1187 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1189 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1191 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1192 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1194 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1195 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1196 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1197 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1199 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1200 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1201 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1203 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1204 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1208 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1210 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1211 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1213 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1214 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1216 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1218 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1219 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1223 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1224 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1225 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1227 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1229 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1230 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1231 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1233 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1234 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1235 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1237 ** Changes in behavior
1239 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1240 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1243 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1247 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1248 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1249 'futimens' system calls.
1253 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1255 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1256 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1257 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1259 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1260 with no USERNAME argument.
1262 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1263 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1264 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1266 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1267 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1268 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1269 number of fields for some inputs.
1271 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1272 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1274 ** Changes in behavior
1276 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1277 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1280 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1284 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1286 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1287 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1288 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1289 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1291 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1292 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1294 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1295 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1297 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1298 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1300 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1301 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1302 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1303 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1305 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1306 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1307 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1308 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1309 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1310 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1312 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1313 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1315 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1316 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1317 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1319 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1320 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1322 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1323 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1325 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1326 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1327 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1328 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1330 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1331 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1333 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1334 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1336 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1337 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1338 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1342 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1343 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1345 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1346 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1347 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1348 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1352 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1353 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1355 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1357 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1361 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1362 which have negative errno values.
1366 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1370 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1374 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1375 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1378 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1382 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1383 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1384 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1386 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1387 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1388 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1389 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1393 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1394 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1395 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1396 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1399 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1403 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1405 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1406 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1407 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1410 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1414 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1415 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1417 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1419 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1421 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1423 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1427 ** Changes in behavior
1429 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1430 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1432 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1433 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1435 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1436 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1437 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1441 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1442 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1443 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1444 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1445 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1446 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1447 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1448 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1449 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1450 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1451 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1453 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1454 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1455 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1458 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1461 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1462 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1463 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1465 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1466 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1467 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1470 ** New build options
1472 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1473 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1474 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1475 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1477 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1478 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1479 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1480 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1481 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1482 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1483 of "make check" fail.
1485 ** Remove deprecated options
1487 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1488 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1489 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1490 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1491 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1493 ** Improved robustness
1495 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1496 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1497 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1498 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1499 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1500 loss of the contents of a/f.
1502 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1503 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1507 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1508 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1509 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1511 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1512 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1513 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1514 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1516 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1517 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1518 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1519 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1520 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1521 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1522 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1523 destination is a symlink.
1525 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1527 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1528 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1530 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1531 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1533 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1535 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1536 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1538 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1539 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1541 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1544 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1545 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1547 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1548 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1550 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1551 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1552 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1553 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1555 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1556 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1557 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1559 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1560 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1561 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1563 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1564 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1565 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1566 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1568 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1569 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1570 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1572 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1573 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1575 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1576 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1578 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1580 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1581 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1582 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1584 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1585 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1587 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1588 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1590 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1591 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1593 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1594 [present in the original version]
1597 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1601 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1603 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1604 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1605 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1607 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1608 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1610 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1614 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1615 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1617 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1618 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1620 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1621 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1623 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1624 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1625 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1626 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1627 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1628 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1630 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1631 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1634 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1635 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1637 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1640 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1641 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1642 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1644 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1645 directory is unreadable.
1647 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1648 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1649 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1651 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1652 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1653 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1654 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1655 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1658 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1659 Before it would print nothing.
1661 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1663 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
1664 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1665 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1666 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1667 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1668 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1669 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1670 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1672 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1676 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1677 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1678 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1680 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1681 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1682 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1683 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1686 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1690 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1691 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1692 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1693 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1694 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1695 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1696 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1698 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1699 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1700 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1701 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1702 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1703 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1704 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1705 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1707 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1708 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1709 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1712 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1716 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1717 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1719 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1720 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1721 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1723 ** Improved robustness
1725 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1726 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1727 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1730 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1734 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1735 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1736 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1737 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1738 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1740 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1744 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1747 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1751 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1752 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1753 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1754 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1756 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1757 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1759 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1760 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1761 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1764 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1766 ** Improved robustness
1768 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1769 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1771 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1772 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1773 or NFS-mounted partition.
1775 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1776 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1780 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1781 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1782 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1783 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1784 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1785 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1787 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1788 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1790 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1791 or neglect to report file removal.
1793 For the "groups" command:
1795 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1796 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1798 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1800 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1802 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1806 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1807 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1810 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1812 ** Changes in behavior
1814 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1815 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1816 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1817 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1819 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1820 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1821 a final `./' or `../' component.
1823 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1824 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1825 this only for pipes.
1827 ** Infrastructure changes
1829 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1830 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1831 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1832 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1836 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1837 name is "." or "..".
1839 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1840 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1841 dirent.d_type support.
1843 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1844 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1846 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1847 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1848 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1849 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1852 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1854 ** Changes in behavior
1856 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1860 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1861 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1865 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1866 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1867 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1869 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1870 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1872 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1873 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1875 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1877 ** Improved robustness
1879 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1880 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1881 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1883 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1884 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1887 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1888 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1890 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1891 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1893 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1894 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1896 ** Changes in behavior
1898 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1899 where the two are distinct.
1901 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1902 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1903 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1904 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1905 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1906 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1907 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1908 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1909 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1910 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1911 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1912 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1913 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1914 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1915 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1916 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1917 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1919 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1920 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1921 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1923 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1924 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1925 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1926 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1929 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1930 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1934 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1935 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1936 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1937 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1939 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1940 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1941 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1943 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1944 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1945 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1946 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1947 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1950 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1951 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1953 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1954 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1955 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1956 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1958 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1959 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1960 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1962 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1963 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1964 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1965 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1967 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1968 and sticky) with the -m option.
1970 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1971 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1972 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1973 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1974 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1976 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1977 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1979 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1983 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1984 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1985 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1986 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1988 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1990 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1992 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1993 silently ignoring one of them.
1995 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1996 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1997 containing this change was 5.92.
1999 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2000 automatically newline terminated.
2002 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2003 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2004 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2005 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2008 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2009 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2010 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2013 ** Scheduled for removal
2015 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2016 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2018 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2019 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2020 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2021 command to unlink a directory.
2023 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2024 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2025 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2026 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2030 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2031 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2032 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2033 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2034 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2035 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2039 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2040 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2042 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2044 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2045 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2046 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2048 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2049 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2052 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2053 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2055 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2056 list directories before files.
2058 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2059 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2060 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2061 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2064 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2066 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
2068 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2069 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2070 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2072 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2073 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2077 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2078 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2079 usually printing nothing.
2081 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2083 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2084 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2085 them with hard-linked directories.
2087 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2088 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2089 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2091 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2092 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2093 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2095 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2098 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2099 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2101 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2102 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2104 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2105 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2107 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2108 all command-line arguments.
2110 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2112 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2114 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2115 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2117 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2119 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2120 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2121 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2122 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2123 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2125 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2126 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2128 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2129 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2130 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2131 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2133 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2135 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2139 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2140 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2142 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2143 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2145 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
2146 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2148 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2149 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
2151 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2152 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2154 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2156 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2157 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2158 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2161 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2163 ** Build-related bug fixes
2165 installing .mo files would fail
2168 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2172 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2174 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2177 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2181 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2182 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2186 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2188 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2189 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2191 ** Deprecated options
2193 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2194 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
2196 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2200 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2202 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
2203 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2204 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2205 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2207 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2210 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2216 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2221 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2223 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2225 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2226 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2227 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2229 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2230 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2231 problematic usages. These include:
2233 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2234 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2235 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2236 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2237 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2238 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2239 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2240 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2241 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2243 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2244 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2246 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2247 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2248 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2249 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2251 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2252 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2253 between binary and text files.
2255 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2259 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2263 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2264 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2266 head tac tail tee tr
2267 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2269 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2270 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2272 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2273 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2274 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2276 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2278 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2280 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2281 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2282 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2286 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2288 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2289 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2291 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2292 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2293 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2297 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2298 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2302 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2303 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2304 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2308 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2309 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2313 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2315 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2317 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2321 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2322 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2323 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2325 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2326 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2327 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2328 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2329 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2331 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2335 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2336 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2337 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2339 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2341 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2342 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2343 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2344 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2346 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2348 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2349 rather than silently wrapping around.
2351 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2352 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2354 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2355 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2357 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2358 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2359 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2360 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2362 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2364 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2366 ** Improved robustness
2368 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2369 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2370 no matter how large the result.
2372 ** Improved portability
2374 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2375 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2377 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2379 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2380 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2381 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2383 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2384 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2388 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2389 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2391 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2393 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2394 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2395 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2396 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2398 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2399 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2401 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2402 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2403 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2405 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2407 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2408 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2410 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2411 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2413 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2415 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2416 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2418 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2419 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2421 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2422 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2423 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2425 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2427 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2429 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2433 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2435 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2436 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2437 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2439 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2440 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2442 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2443 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2444 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2446 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2447 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2449 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2450 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2451 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2452 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2454 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2455 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2457 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2458 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2459 the file system does not support it.
2461 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2463 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2464 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2466 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2468 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2469 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2471 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2472 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2473 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2474 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2476 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2477 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2480 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2481 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2482 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2483 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2485 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2486 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2487 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2488 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2490 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2491 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2493 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2495 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2496 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2497 reporting incorrect results.
2501 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2502 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2504 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2507 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2509 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2510 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2512 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2513 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2515 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2518 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2519 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2520 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2521 the file name does not look like a page range.
2523 printf has several changes:
2525 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2526 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2528 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2529 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2530 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2532 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2533 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2536 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2537 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2539 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2540 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2542 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2544 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2545 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2547 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2549 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2551 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2552 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2553 when first encountering the directory.
2557 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2558 output; POSIX requires this.
2560 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2561 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2563 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2565 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2566 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2568 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2569 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2571 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2572 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2573 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2574 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2575 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2576 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2577 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2579 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2580 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2581 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2583 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2584 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2586 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2588 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2590 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2591 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2592 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2593 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2595 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2599 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2600 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2601 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2602 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2603 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2605 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2606 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2607 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2609 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2610 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2612 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2613 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2615 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2616 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2617 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2618 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2619 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2621 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2622 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2624 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2625 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2627 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2629 nocreat do not create the output file
2630 excl fail if the output file already exists
2631 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2632 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2634 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2636 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2637 direct use direct I/O for data
2638 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2639 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2640 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2641 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2642 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2644 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2646 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2647 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2650 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2651 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2652 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2653 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2654 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2655 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2657 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2658 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2660 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2663 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2665 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2667 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2668 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2670 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2671 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2672 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2674 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2675 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2676 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2678 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2680 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2681 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2683 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2684 for compatibility with bash.
2686 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2688 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2689 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2690 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2691 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2693 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2694 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2696 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2697 ls supports TABSIZE.
2698 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2699 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2700 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2702 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2705 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2707 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2708 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2709 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2710 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2711 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2712 an offset, not as a file name.
2714 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2715 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2717 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2718 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2720 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2721 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2723 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2724 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2725 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2727 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2728 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2730 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2731 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2735 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2737 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2739 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2743 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2744 or more arguments between partitions.
2746 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2747 holes in the destination.
2749 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2750 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2751 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2752 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2753 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2754 terminates immediately.
2756 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2758 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2760 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2761 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2762 not the empty string.
2764 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2765 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2769 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2770 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2771 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2774 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2781 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2785 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2786 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2788 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2789 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2791 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2792 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2793 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2796 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2800 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2801 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2803 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2804 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2806 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2807 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2808 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2810 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2812 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2815 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2817 ** Configuration option
2819 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2820 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2824 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2825 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2829 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2830 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2831 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2834 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2835 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2836 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2837 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2838 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2839 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2840 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2843 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2847 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2848 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2849 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2851 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2852 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2854 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2856 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2857 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2858 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2859 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2861 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2863 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2864 not just the ones that reference directories
2866 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2867 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2869 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2870 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2871 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2873 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2874 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2875 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2876 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2877 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2878 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2880 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2885 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2886 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2888 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2890 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2892 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2894 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2895 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2897 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2898 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2900 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2902 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2906 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2908 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2910 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2911 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2912 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2913 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2914 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2916 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2917 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2919 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2920 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2922 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2923 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2925 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2926 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2927 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2931 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2932 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2933 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2934 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2935 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2936 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2937 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2938 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2939 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2940 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2941 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2942 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2943 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2944 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2946 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2948 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2949 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2951 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2953 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2955 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2956 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2958 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2960 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2961 without a trailing newline.
2963 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2964 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2966 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2969 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2973 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2975 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2977 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2978 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2979 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2980 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2982 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2984 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2985 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2986 be printed without leading spaces.
2988 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2989 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2994 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2995 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2996 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2998 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3000 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3001 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3003 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3004 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3006 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3007 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3009 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3011 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3013 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3015 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
3016 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3018 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3020 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3022 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3023 byte offsets are specified.
3026 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3029 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
3032 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3033 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3034 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3035 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3036 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3037 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3038 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3039 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
3040 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3041 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3042 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3043 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3044 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3045 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3046 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3047 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3048 directory where M has write access.
3049 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3050 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3051 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3054 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3055 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
3056 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3057 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3058 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3059 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
3060 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3061 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3062 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3063 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3064 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3065 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3066 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3067 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3068 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3069 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3070 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3071 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3072 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
3073 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3074 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3075 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3076 appeared one additional time.
3078 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3079 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3080 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3081 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3084 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
3085 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3086 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3087 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3088 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3089 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3090 if there were more than 338.
3092 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3093 - false --help now exits nonzero
3096 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3097 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3098 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3099 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3102 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3103 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
3104 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
3105 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3106 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3109 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3110 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3111 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3112 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
3113 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3114 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3115 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3118 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3119 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3120 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3121 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3122 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3123 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3125 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3126 under certain unusual conditions
3127 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3128 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3131 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3132 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3133 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3134 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3135 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3136 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
3137 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3138 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3139 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
3140 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
3141 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3142 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3143 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3144 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3145 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3146 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3149 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3150 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3153 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3154 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3155 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3156 involving hard-linked directories
3157 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3158 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
3159 character-special and block files
3162 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3163 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3164 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3165 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3166 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3167 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3168 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3169 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3170 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3172 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
3173 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
3174 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3175 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3176 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3177 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3178 specified on the command line.
3179 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3180 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
3181 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3182 the first file untouched.
3183 * readlink: new program
3184 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3185 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3186 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3187 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3188 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3189 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3192 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3193 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3194 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3195 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3196 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3197 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3198 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
3199 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
3200 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3201 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3202 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3203 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3205 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3206 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3207 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3209 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3210 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3211 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3212 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3213 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3214 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3215 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3216 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
3219 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3220 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3223 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3224 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3225 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3226 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3227 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3228 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3229 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3232 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3233 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3235 ========================================================================
3236 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3237 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3240 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3242 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3243 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3244 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3245 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3246 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3247 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3248 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3249 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3250 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3251 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3252 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3253 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3255 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3256 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3257 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3258 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3260 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3263 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3265 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3266 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3267 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3268 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3269 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3270 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3271 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3274 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3275 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3276 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3277 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3278 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3279 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3280 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3281 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3282 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3283 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3284 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3285 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3286 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3287 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3288 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3289 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3291 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3292 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3294 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3295 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3296 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3297 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3298 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3299 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3301 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3302 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3303 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3304 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3305 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3306 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3307 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3309 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3310 the source files in the following example:
3311 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3312 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3313 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3314 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3315 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3316 links between source files with --preserve=links
3317 * cp accepts new options:
3318 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3319 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3320 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3321 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3322 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3323 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3324 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3325 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3326 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3328 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3329 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3330 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3331 even though it's older than dest.
3332 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3333 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3334 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3335 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3336 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3338 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3339 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3340 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3341 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3342 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3343 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3344 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3346 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3347 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3348 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3350 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3351 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3352 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3353 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3354 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3355 This is the default.
3357 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3358 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3359 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3360 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3361 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3363 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3366 ========================================================================
3367 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3368 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3371 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3372 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3374 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3375 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3376 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3377 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3378 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3380 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3381 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3382 that specifies a non-directory
3385 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3386 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3387 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3388 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3389 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3390 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3391 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3392 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3393 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3394 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3395 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3396 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3397 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3398 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3399 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3400 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3401 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3402 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3403 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3404 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3405 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3406 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3407 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3408 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3410 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3411 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3412 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3414 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3416 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3417 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3419 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3420 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3421 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3422 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3423 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3425 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3426 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3427 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3428 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3429 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3431 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3433 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3434 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3435 * still more portability fixes
3436 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3437 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3439 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3441 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3443 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3445 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3446 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3447 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3448 there is any time remaining
3449 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3451 ========================================================================
3452 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3453 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3455 This package began as the union of the following:
3456 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3458 ========================================================================
3460 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3462 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3463 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3464 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3465 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3466 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3467 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.