1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
8 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
11 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
12 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
15 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
16 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
17 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
18 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
19 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
21 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
22 System V style platforms where this information is available only
23 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
25 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
28 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
31 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
32 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
33 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
35 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
36 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
39 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
40 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
42 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
44 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
45 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
47 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
48 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
50 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
51 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
53 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
54 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
55 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
56 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
58 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
59 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
60 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
62 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
63 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
64 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
66 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
67 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
70 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
71 only doing so if --retry is specified.
72 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
74 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
75 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
77 ** Changes in behavior
79 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
81 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
82 values for any argument.
84 stat now outputs nanosecond information for time stamps even if
85 they are out of localtime range.
87 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
88 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
89 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
90 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
94 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
95 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
97 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
99 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
100 written to a terminal.
102 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
103 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
105 stat and tail now know about "prl_fs" (a parallels file system),
106 "m1fs" (a Plexistor file system), "wslfs" (Windows Subsystem for Linux),
107 and "smb2". stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
108 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", inotify for "m1fs",
109 and attempts inotify for "wslfs".
111 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
112 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
116 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
117 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
121 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
123 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
124 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
126 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
129 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
133 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
134 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
135 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
136 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
138 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
139 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
141 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
142 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
143 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
145 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
148 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
149 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
152 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
153 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
155 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
156 that specify an offset for the first field.
157 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
159 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
160 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
164 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
165 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
169 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
170 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
172 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
173 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
174 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
175 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
176 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
178 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
179 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
180 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
182 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
183 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
184 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
186 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
187 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
189 ** Changes in behavior
191 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
192 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
194 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
195 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
197 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
198 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
200 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
201 when outputting to a terminal.
203 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
207 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
208 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
210 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
211 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
213 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
214 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
215 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
217 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
218 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
220 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
221 upon detection of a directory cycle.
222 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
224 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
226 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
227 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
228 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
230 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
231 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
234 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
238 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
239 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
241 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
244 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
245 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
246 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
248 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
249 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
250 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
251 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
253 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
254 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
255 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
256 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
258 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
259 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
261 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
262 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
264 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
265 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
266 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
268 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
269 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
270 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
272 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
273 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
274 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
276 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
277 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
278 character at the 4GiB position.
279 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
281 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
282 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
284 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
285 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
287 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
288 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
289 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
291 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
294 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
295 replaced before inotify watches were created.
296 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
298 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
299 [bug introduced in the beginning]
301 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
302 when those files are being created or renamed.
303 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
307 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
308 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
309 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
310 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
312 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
313 on stderr approximately every second.
315 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
316 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
318 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
319 other than the default newline character.
321 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
322 a useful setting with high latency links.
324 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
325 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
327 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
328 and output errors in general.
330 ** Changes in behavior
332 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
333 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
334 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
335 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
337 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
338 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
339 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
340 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
341 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
343 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
344 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
346 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
348 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
349 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
351 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
352 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
356 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
357 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
359 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
360 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
362 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
363 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
365 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
366 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
368 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
370 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
371 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
372 documentation are provided.
375 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
379 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
380 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
382 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
383 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
384 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
387 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
388 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
389 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
390 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
392 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
393 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
395 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
396 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
398 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
399 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
400 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
401 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
402 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
403 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
417 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
419 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
420 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
421 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
422 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
423 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
424 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
426 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
427 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
428 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
429 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
431 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
432 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
433 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
435 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
436 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
437 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
438 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
440 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
441 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
442 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
444 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
445 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
446 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
448 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
449 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
450 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
451 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
452 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
454 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
455 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
458 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
459 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
461 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
462 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
463 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
465 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
466 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
468 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
469 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
471 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
474 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
475 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
477 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
478 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
481 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
482 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
486 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
487 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
489 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
490 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
491 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
492 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
493 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
494 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
495 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
496 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
497 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
498 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
499 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
500 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
501 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
502 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
503 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
504 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
505 it suitable for embedded system.
507 ** Changes in behavior
509 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
510 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
512 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
513 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
515 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
516 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
517 will result in the delayed output of lines.
519 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
520 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
521 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
525 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
526 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
527 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
529 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
531 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
532 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
533 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
535 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
536 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
537 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
538 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
540 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
541 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
543 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
544 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
545 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
548 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
552 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
553 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
554 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
556 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
557 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
558 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
559 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
561 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
562 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
563 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
565 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
566 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
568 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
570 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
571 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
572 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
574 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
575 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
576 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
578 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
579 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
580 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
581 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
583 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
584 from the source, when copying across file systems.
585 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
587 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
588 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
589 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
591 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
592 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
594 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
595 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
596 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
597 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
599 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
600 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
601 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
603 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
604 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
605 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
609 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
610 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
611 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
613 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
614 used to identify the split points.
616 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
617 command line argument through to the output.
619 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
622 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
623 a NUL instead of a white space character.
625 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
626 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
628 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
630 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
631 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
632 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
634 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
635 unique groups with empty lines.
637 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
638 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
640 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
643 ** Changes in behavior
645 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
646 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
647 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
648 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
650 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
651 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
653 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
654 not just the transfer counts.
656 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
658 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
659 as per the documented interface.
663 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
665 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
666 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
667 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
668 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
670 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
671 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
672 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
673 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
675 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
676 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
677 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
679 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
680 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
682 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
683 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
685 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
689 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
692 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
696 numfmt: reformat numbers
700 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
701 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
702 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
704 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
705 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
706 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
708 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
709 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
713 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
716 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
717 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
720 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
721 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
722 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
724 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
725 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
726 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
728 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
729 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
730 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
732 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
733 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
734 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
736 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
737 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
739 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
740 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
742 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
743 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
744 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
746 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
747 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
748 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
750 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
751 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
752 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
754 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
755 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
756 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
757 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
759 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
760 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
761 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
763 ** Changes in behavior
765 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
766 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
767 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
768 'total' in the target column.
770 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
771 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
772 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
774 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
775 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
777 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
778 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
782 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
783 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
785 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
786 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
788 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
792 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
793 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
794 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
795 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
796 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
797 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
798 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
799 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
800 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
801 for a patched distribution package.
803 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
804 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
806 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
807 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
808 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
809 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
812 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
816 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
818 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
819 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
820 sha384sum and sha512sum.
824 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
825 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
826 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
827 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
828 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
830 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
831 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
833 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
834 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
835 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
836 eventually exits nonzero.
838 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
839 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
840 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
841 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
842 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
844 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
845 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
846 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
848 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
849 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
850 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
852 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
853 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
856 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
857 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
858 Before, this would infloop:
859 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
860 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
862 ** Changes in behavior
864 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
868 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
869 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
870 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
871 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
872 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
875 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
876 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
877 format-changing options.
879 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
880 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
881 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
882 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
883 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
887 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
888 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
889 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
890 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
891 are run without following the instructions in README.
893 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
894 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
895 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
896 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
897 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
898 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
899 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
902 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
906 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
907 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
908 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
909 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
911 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
912 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
913 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
914 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
916 sort -u could read freed memory.
917 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
918 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
919 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
923 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
924 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
925 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
926 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
929 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
933 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
934 processes will not intersperse their output.
935 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
937 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
938 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
939 date: invalid date '\260'
940 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
942 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
943 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
944 lines output by df, can work reliably.
945 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
947 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
948 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
949 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
951 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
952 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
953 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
954 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
955 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
956 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
958 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
959 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
961 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
962 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
964 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
965 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
966 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
968 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
969 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
970 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
974 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
976 ** Changes in behavior
978 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
979 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
980 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
981 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
982 have any reason to include it here.
986 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
987 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
988 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
990 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
991 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
992 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
995 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
999 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1000 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1001 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1002 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1003 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1004 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1006 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1007 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1008 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1009 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1010 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1011 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1012 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1014 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1015 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1017 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1018 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1022 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1023 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1025 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1027 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1029 ** Changes in behavior
1031 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1032 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1033 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1035 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1036 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1039 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1043 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1044 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1045 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1046 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1047 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1048 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1049 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1050 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1052 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1053 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1054 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1055 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1056 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1058 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1059 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1061 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1062 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1064 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1065 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1067 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1068 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1070 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1071 additional static suffix to output file names.
1073 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1074 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1075 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1077 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1078 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1082 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1083 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1086 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1087 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1088 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1089 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1090 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1091 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1093 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1094 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1095 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1096 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1097 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1099 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1100 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1101 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1102 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1106 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1107 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1108 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1110 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1111 instead of causing a usage failure.
1113 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1116 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1120 realpath: print resolved file names.
1124 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1125 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1127 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1128 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1130 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1131 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1132 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1133 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1134 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1135 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1137 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1138 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1139 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1141 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1142 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1143 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1145 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1146 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1147 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1148 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1149 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1151 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1153 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1154 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1156 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1157 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1158 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1160 ** Changes in behavior
1162 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1163 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1164 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1165 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1166 usually-short referent instead.
1168 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1169 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1170 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1171 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1174 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1178 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1179 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1180 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1182 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1183 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1185 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1186 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1190 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1191 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1193 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1194 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1195 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1196 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1198 ** Changes in behavior
1200 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1201 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1202 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1206 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1207 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1208 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1211 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1215 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1216 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1217 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1219 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1220 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1222 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1223 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1224 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1225 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1226 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1228 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1229 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1230 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1231 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1232 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1233 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1234 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1235 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1237 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1238 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1240 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1241 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1243 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1246 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1247 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1248 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1250 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1251 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1252 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1253 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1255 ** Changes in behavior
1257 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1258 when -v or -c specified.
1260 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1261 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1265 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1266 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1267 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1268 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1269 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1271 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1272 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1273 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1275 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1276 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1277 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1278 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1279 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1280 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1281 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1283 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1284 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1285 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1289 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1290 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1292 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1295 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1296 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1298 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1299 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1301 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1302 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1304 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1306 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1310 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1311 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1313 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1316 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1320 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1321 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1323 ** Changes in behavior
1325 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1326 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1327 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1328 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1329 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1330 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1331 resolved for 2.6.39.
1332 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1333 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1334 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1338 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1341 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1345 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1346 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1349 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1350 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1351 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1353 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1354 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1355 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1357 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1360 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1361 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1363 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1364 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1366 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1371 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1372 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1373 processed portion thereof.
1375 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1376 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1378 ** Changes in behavior
1380 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1381 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1382 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1384 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1385 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1386 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1388 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1389 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1391 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1392 Use --preserve-context instead.
1394 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1397 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1401 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1402 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1403 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1404 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1405 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1407 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1408 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1410 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1411 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1412 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1414 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1415 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1417 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1418 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1422 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1423 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1424 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1425 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1426 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1427 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1428 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1429 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1431 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1432 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1433 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1435 ** Changes in behavior
1437 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1438 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1439 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1442 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1446 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1447 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1448 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1451 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1455 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1456 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
1458 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1459 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1461 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1462 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1464 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1465 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1466 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1467 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1469 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1470 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1472 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1473 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1474 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1476 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1478 ** Changes in behavior
1480 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1481 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1482 to the number of available processors.
1486 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1489 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1493 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1494 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1495 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1496 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1498 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1499 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1500 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1502 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1503 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1505 ** Changes in behavior
1507 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1508 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1510 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1511 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1512 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1513 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
1514 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1515 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1517 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1518 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1519 the same way as the others.
1521 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1522 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1525 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1529 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1530 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1531 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1533 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1534 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1536 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1537 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1538 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1540 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1541 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1543 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1544 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1546 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1547 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1548 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1550 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1551 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1552 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1553 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1557 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1558 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1560 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1563 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1564 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1566 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1568 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1569 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1570 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1572 ** Changes in behavior
1574 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1575 rather than its aliased target.
1577 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1578 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1579 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1581 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1582 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1583 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1584 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1585 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1586 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1587 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1588 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1590 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1592 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1594 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1595 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1598 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1599 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1600 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1601 control like taskset for example.
1603 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1605 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1606 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1607 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1608 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1609 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1610 includes %C when context information is available.
1612 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1613 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1614 rather than a file system attribute.
1616 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1617 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1618 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1619 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1621 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1622 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1623 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1625 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1626 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1627 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1630 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1634 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1635 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1637 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1639 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1640 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1642 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1643 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1644 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1645 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1647 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1648 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1649 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1653 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1654 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1656 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1657 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1658 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1660 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1661 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1662 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1663 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1664 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1665 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1666 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1667 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1668 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1670 ** Changes in behavior
1672 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1673 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1675 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1676 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1679 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1683 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1684 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1685 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1686 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1690 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1691 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1693 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1694 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1695 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1696 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1698 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1699 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1700 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1703 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1707 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1708 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1709 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1711 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1712 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1713 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1715 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1716 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1718 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1719 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1720 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1721 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1723 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1724 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1725 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1727 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1728 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1729 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1730 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1732 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1733 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1734 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1736 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1737 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1738 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1739 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1741 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1742 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1743 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1745 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1746 processes will not intersperse their output.
1747 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1750 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1754 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1755 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1757 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1758 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1760 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1761 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1762 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1763 the presence of the empty string argument.
1764 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1766 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1767 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1768 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1769 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1771 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1772 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1774 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1775 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1776 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1778 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1779 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1780 and with a malicious user on the same system
1781 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1782 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1785 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1789 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1790 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1791 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1793 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1794 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1795 offending directory and all "contents."
1797 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1798 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1799 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1801 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1802 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1803 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1805 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1806 processes will not intersperse their output.
1807 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1808 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1810 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1811 output the name of the file to stdout.
1812 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1814 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1815 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1816 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1818 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1819 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1822 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1823 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1824 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1826 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1827 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1828 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1829 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1830 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1831 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1833 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1834 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1835 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1836 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1838 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1839 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1841 ** Changes in behavior
1843 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1844 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1845 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1846 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1847 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1849 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1850 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1851 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1852 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1854 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1856 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1857 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1858 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1859 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1860 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1864 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1868 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1869 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1871 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1872 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1874 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1875 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1876 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1878 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1879 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1882 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1886 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1887 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1888 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1890 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1891 to accommodate leap seconds.
1892 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1894 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1895 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1896 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1898 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1900 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1901 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1902 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1904 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1905 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1906 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1907 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1908 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1912 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1913 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1914 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1915 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1917 ** Changes in behavior
1919 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1920 environment variable is set.
1922 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1923 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1924 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1928 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1929 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1930 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1931 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1933 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1934 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1935 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1936 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1940 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1941 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1942 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1944 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1945 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1946 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1947 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1948 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1949 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1950 another improvement:
1952 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1953 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1956 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1960 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1961 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1962 and libraries tested at configure time.
1963 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1965 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1966 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1968 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1969 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1971 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1972 printing a summary to stderr.
1973 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1975 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1976 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1977 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1979 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1980 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1982 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1983 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1984 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1985 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1987 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1988 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1989 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1990 which is relatively unusual.
1991 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1993 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1994 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1995 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1996 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1997 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1998 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1999 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2003 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2004 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2005 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2006 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2007 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2011 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2012 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2014 ** Changes in behavior
2016 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2017 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2018 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2019 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2020 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2023 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2027 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2028 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2030 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2031 before data copying has started.
2033 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2034 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2036 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2037 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2038 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2039 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2041 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2042 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2043 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2044 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2046 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2051 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2052 for its standard streams.
2054 ** Changes in behavior
2056 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2057 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2058 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2059 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2060 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2061 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2063 ** Deprecated options
2065 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2066 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2070 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2072 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2073 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2074 a btrfs file system.
2076 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
2078 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2079 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2081 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2082 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2085 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2089 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2090 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2091 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2092 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2094 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2095 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2096 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2097 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2098 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2103 make check: two tests have been corrected
2107 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2108 inherited from gnulib.
2111 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2115 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2116 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2117 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2118 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2120 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2121 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2123 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2125 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2126 systems without xattr support.
2128 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2129 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2130 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2132 ** Changes in behavior
2134 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2135 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2136 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2137 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2139 ** Improved robustness
2141 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2142 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2143 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2144 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2145 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2146 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2147 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2148 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2149 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2153 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2154 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2156 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2157 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2158 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2159 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2160 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2163 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2167 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2168 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2169 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2173 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2174 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2175 data was read, or on process exit.
2176 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2178 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2179 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2180 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2181 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2183 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2184 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2185 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2186 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2188 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2189 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2191 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2192 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2194 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2195 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2196 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2198 ** Changes in behavior
2200 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2201 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2202 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2204 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2205 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2207 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2208 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2209 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2212 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2216 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2218 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2219 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2220 install: Never copies xattrs
2222 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2223 from overwriting any existing destination file
2225 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2226 mode where this feature is available.
2228 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2229 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2230 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2231 do not modify the destination at all.
2233 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2235 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2239 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2240 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2242 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2244 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2245 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2247 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2248 processing the first file name
2250 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2251 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2252 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2253 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2255 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2256 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2258 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2259 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2262 ** Changes in behavior
2264 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2265 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2267 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2268 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2269 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2271 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2272 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2274 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2276 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2277 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2278 is still marked with a '+'.
2281 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2285 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2286 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2290 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2291 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2292 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2293 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2294 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2295 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2297 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2298 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2300 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2301 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2303 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2305 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2306 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2307 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2309 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2310 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2312 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2313 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2314 used to factor large numbers.
2316 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2319 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2321 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2323 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2324 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2326 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2327 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2328 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2329 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2331 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2332 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2333 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2335 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2336 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2340 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2342 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2343 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2345 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2346 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2348 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2350 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2351 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2355 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2356 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2357 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2359 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2361 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2362 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2363 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2365 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2366 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2367 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2369 ** Changes in behavior
2371 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2372 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2375 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2379 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2380 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2381 'futimens' system calls.
2385 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2387 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2388 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2389 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2391 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2392 with no USERNAME argument.
2394 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2395 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2396 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2398 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2399 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2400 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2401 number of fields for some inputs.
2403 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2404 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2406 ** Changes in behavior
2408 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2409 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2412 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2416 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2418 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2419 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2420 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2421 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2423 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2424 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2426 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2427 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2429 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2430 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2432 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2433 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2434 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2435 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2437 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2438 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2439 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2440 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2441 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2442 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2444 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2445 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2447 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2448 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2449 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2451 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2452 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2454 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2455 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2457 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2458 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2459 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2460 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2462 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2463 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2465 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2466 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2468 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2469 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2470 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2474 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2475 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2477 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2478 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2479 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2480 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2484 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2485 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2487 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2489 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2493 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2494 which have negative errno values.
2498 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2502 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2506 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2507 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2510 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2514 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2515 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2516 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2518 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2519 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2520 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2521 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2525 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2526 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2527 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2528 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2531 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2535 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2537 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2538 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2539 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2542 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2546 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2547 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2549 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2551 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2553 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2555 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2559 ** Changes in behavior
2561 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2562 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2564 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2565 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2567 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2568 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2569 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2573 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2574 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2575 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2576 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2577 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2578 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2579 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2580 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2581 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2582 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2583 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2585 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2586 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2587 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2590 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2593 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2594 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2595 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2597 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2598 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2599 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2602 ** New build options
2604 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2605 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2606 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2607 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2609 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2610 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2611 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2612 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2613 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2614 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2615 of "make check" fail.
2617 ** Remove deprecated options
2619 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2620 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2621 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2622 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2623 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2625 ** Improved robustness
2627 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2628 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2629 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2630 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2631 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2632 loss of the contents of a/f.
2634 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2635 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2639 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2640 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2641 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2643 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2644 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2645 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2646 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2648 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2649 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2650 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2651 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2652 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2653 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2654 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2655 destination is a symlink.
2657 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2659 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2660 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2662 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2663 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2665 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2667 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2668 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2670 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2671 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2673 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2676 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2677 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2679 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2680 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2682 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2683 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2684 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2685 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2687 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2688 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2689 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2691 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2692 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2693 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2695 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2696 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2697 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2698 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2700 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2701 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2702 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2704 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2705 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2707 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2708 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2710 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2712 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2713 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2714 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2716 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2717 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2719 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2720 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2722 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2723 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2725 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2726 [present in the original version]
2729 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2733 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2735 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2736 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2737 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2739 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2740 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2742 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2746 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2747 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2749 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2750 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2752 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2753 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2755 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2756 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2757 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2758 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2759 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2760 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2762 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2763 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2766 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2767 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2769 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2772 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2773 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2774 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2776 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2777 directory is unreadable.
2779 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2780 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2781 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2783 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2784 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2785 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2786 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2787 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2790 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2791 Before it would print nothing.
2793 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2795 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2796 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2797 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2798 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2799 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2800 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2801 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2802 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2804 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2808 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2809 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2810 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2812 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2813 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2814 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2815 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2818 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2822 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2823 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2824 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2825 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2826 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2827 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2828 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2830 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2831 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2832 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2833 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2834 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2835 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2836 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2837 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2839 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2840 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2841 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2844 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2848 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2849 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2851 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2852 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2853 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2855 ** Improved robustness
2857 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2858 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2859 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2862 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2866 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2867 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2868 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2869 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2870 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2872 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2876 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2879 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2883 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2884 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2885 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2886 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2888 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2889 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2891 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2892 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2893 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2896 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2898 ** Improved robustness
2900 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2901 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2903 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2904 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2905 or NFS-mounted partition.
2907 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2908 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2912 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2913 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2914 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2915 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2916 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2917 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2919 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2920 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2922 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2923 or neglect to report file removal.
2925 For the "groups" command:
2927 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2928 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2930 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2932 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2934 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2938 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2939 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2942 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2944 ** Changes in behavior
2946 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2947 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2948 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2949 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2951 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2952 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2953 a final './' or '../' component.
2955 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2956 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2957 this only for pipes.
2959 ** Infrastructure changes
2961 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2962 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2963 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2964 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2968 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2969 name is "." or "..".
2971 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2972 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2973 dirent.d_type support.
2975 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2976 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2978 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2979 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2980 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2981 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2984 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2986 ** Changes in behavior
2988 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2992 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2993 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2997 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2998 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2999 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3001 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3002 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3004 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3005 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3007 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3009 ** Improved robustness
3011 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3012 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3013 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3015 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3016 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3019 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3020 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3022 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3023 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3025 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3026 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3028 ** Changes in behavior
3030 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3031 where the two are distinct.
3033 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3034 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3035 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3036 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3037 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3038 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3039 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3040 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3041 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3042 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3043 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3044 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3045 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3046 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3047 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3048 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3049 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3051 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3052 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3053 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3055 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3056 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3057 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3058 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3061 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3062 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3066 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3067 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3068 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3069 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3071 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3072 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3073 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3075 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3076 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3077 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3078 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3079 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3082 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3083 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3085 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3086 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3087 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3088 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3090 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3091 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3092 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3094 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3095 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3096 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3097 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3099 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3100 and sticky) with the -m option.
3102 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3103 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3104 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3105 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3106 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3108 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3109 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3111 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3115 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3116 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3117 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3118 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3120 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3122 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3124 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3125 silently ignoring one of them.
3127 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3128 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3129 containing this change was 5.92.
3131 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3132 automatically newline terminated.
3134 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3135 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3136 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3137 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3140 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3141 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3142 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3145 ** Scheduled for removal
3147 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3148 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3150 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3151 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3152 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3153 command to unlink a directory.
3155 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3156 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3157 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3158 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3162 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3163 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3164 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3165 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3166 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3167 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3171 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3172 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3174 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3176 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3177 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3178 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3180 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3181 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3184 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3185 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3187 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3188 list directories before files.
3190 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3191 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3192 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3193 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3196 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3198 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3200 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3201 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3202 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3204 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3205 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3209 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3210 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3211 usually printing nothing.
3213 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3215 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3216 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3217 them with hard-linked directories.
3219 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3220 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3221 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3223 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3224 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3225 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3227 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3230 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3231 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3233 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3234 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3236 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3237 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3239 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3240 all command-line arguments.
3242 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3244 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3246 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3247 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3249 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3251 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3252 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3253 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3254 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3255 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3257 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3258 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3260 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3261 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3262 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3263 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3265 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3267 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3271 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3272 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3274 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3275 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3277 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3278 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3280 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3281 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3283 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3284 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3286 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3288 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3289 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3290 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3293 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3295 ** Build-related bug fixes
3297 installing .mo files would fail
3300 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3304 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3306 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3309 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3313 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3314 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3318 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3320 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3321 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3323 ** Deprecated options
3325 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3326 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3328 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3332 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3334 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3335 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3336 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3337 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3339 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3342 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3348 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3353 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3355 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3357 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3358 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3359 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3361 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3362 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3363 problematic usages. These include:
3365 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3366 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3367 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3368 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3369 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3370 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3371 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3372 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3373 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3375 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3376 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3378 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3379 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3380 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3381 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3383 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3384 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3385 between binary and text files.
3387 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3391 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3395 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3396 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3398 head tac tail tee tr
3399 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3401 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3402 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3404 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3405 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3406 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3408 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3410 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3412 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3413 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3414 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3418 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3420 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3421 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3423 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3424 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3425 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3429 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3430 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3434 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3435 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3436 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3440 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3441 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3445 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3447 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3449 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3453 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3454 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3455 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3457 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3458 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3459 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3460 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3461 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3463 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3467 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3468 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3469 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3471 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3473 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3474 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3475 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3476 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3478 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3480 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3481 rather than silently wrapping around.
3483 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3484 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3486 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3487 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3489 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3490 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3491 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3492 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3494 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3496 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3498 ** Improved robustness
3500 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3501 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3502 no matter how large the result.
3504 ** Improved portability
3506 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3507 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3509 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3511 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3512 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3513 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3515 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3516 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3520 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3521 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3523 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3525 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3526 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3527 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3528 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3530 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3531 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3533 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3534 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3535 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3537 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3539 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3540 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3542 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3543 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3545 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3547 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3548 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3550 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3551 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3553 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3554 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3555 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3557 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3559 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3561 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3565 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3567 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3568 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3569 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3571 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3572 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3574 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3575 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3576 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3578 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3579 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3581 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3582 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3583 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3584 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3586 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3587 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3589 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3590 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3591 the file system does not support it.
3593 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3595 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3596 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3598 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3600 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3601 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3603 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3604 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3605 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3606 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3608 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3609 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3612 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3613 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3614 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3615 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3617 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3618 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3619 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3620 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3622 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3623 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3625 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3627 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3628 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3629 reporting incorrect results.
3633 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3634 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3636 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3639 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3641 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3642 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3644 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3645 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3647 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3650 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3651 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3652 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3653 the file name does not look like a page range.
3655 printf has several changes:
3657 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3658 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3660 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3661 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3662 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3664 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3665 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3668 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3669 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3671 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3672 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3674 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3676 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3677 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3679 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3681 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3683 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3684 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3685 when first encountering the directory.
3689 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3690 output; POSIX requires this.
3692 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3693 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3695 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3697 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3698 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3700 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3701 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3703 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3704 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3705 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3706 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3707 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3708 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3709 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3711 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3712 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3713 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3715 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3716 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3718 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3720 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3722 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3723 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3724 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3725 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3727 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3731 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3732 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3733 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3734 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3735 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3737 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3738 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3739 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3741 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3742 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3744 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3745 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3747 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3748 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3749 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3750 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3751 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3753 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3754 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3756 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3757 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3759 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3761 nocreat do not create the output file
3762 excl fail if the output file already exists
3763 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3764 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3766 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3768 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3769 direct use direct I/O for data
3770 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3771 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3772 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3773 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3774 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3776 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3778 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3779 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3782 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3783 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3784 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3785 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3786 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3787 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3789 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3790 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3792 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3795 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3797 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3799 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3800 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3802 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3803 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3804 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3806 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3807 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3808 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3810 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3812 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3813 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3815 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3816 for compatibility with bash.
3818 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3820 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3821 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3822 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3823 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3825 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3826 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3828 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3829 ls supports TABSIZE.
3830 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3831 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3832 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3834 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3837 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3839 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3840 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3841 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3842 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3843 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3844 an offset, not as a file name.
3846 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3847 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3849 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3850 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3852 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3853 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3855 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3856 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3857 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3859 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3860 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3862 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3863 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3867 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3869 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3871 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3875 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3876 or more arguments between partitions.
3878 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3879 holes in the destination.
3881 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3882 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3883 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3884 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3885 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3886 terminates immediately.
3888 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3890 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3892 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3893 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3894 not the empty string.
3896 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3897 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3901 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3902 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3903 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3906 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3913 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3917 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3918 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3920 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3921 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3923 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3924 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3925 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3928 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3932 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3933 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3935 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3936 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3938 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3939 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3940 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3942 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3944 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3947 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3949 ** Configuration option
3951 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3952 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3956 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3957 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3961 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3962 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3963 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3966 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3967 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3968 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3969 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3970 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3971 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3972 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3975 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3979 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3980 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3981 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3983 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3984 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3986 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3988 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3989 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3990 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3991 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3993 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3995 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3996 not just the ones that reference directories
3998 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3999 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4001 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4002 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4003 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4005 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4006 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4007 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4008 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4009 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4010 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4012 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4017 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4018 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4020 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4022 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4024 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4026 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4027 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4029 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4030 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4032 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4034 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4038 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4040 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4042 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4043 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4044 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4045 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4046 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4048 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4049 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4051 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4052 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4054 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4055 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4057 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4058 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4059 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4063 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4064 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4065 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4066 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4067 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4068 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4069 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4070 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4071 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4072 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4073 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4074 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4075 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4076 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4078 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4080 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4081 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4083 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4085 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4087 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4088 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4090 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4092 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4093 without a trailing newline.
4095 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4096 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4098 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4101 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4105 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4107 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4109 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4110 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4111 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4112 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4114 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4116 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4117 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4118 be printed without leading spaces.
4120 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4121 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4126 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4127 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4128 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4130 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4132 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4133 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4135 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4136 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4138 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4139 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4141 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4143 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4145 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4147 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4148 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4150 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4152 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4154 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4155 byte offsets are specified.
4158 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4161 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4164 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4165 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4166 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4167 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4168 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4169 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4170 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4171 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4172 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4173 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4174 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4175 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4176 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4177 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4178 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4179 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4180 directory where M has write access.
4181 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4182 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4183 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4186 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4187 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4188 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4189 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4190 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4191 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4192 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4193 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4194 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4195 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4196 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4197 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4198 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4199 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4200 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4201 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4202 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4203 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4204 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4205 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4206 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4207 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4208 appeared one additional time.
4210 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4211 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4212 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4213 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4216 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4217 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4218 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4219 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4220 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4221 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4222 if there were more than 338.
4224 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4225 - false --help now exits nonzero
4228 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4229 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4230 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4231 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4234 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4235 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4236 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4237 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4238 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4241 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4242 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4243 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4244 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4245 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4246 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4247 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4250 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4251 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4252 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4253 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4254 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4255 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4257 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4258 under certain unusual conditions
4259 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4260 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4263 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4264 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4265 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4266 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4267 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4268 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4269 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4270 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4271 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4272 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4273 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4274 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4275 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4276 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4277 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4278 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4281 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4282 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4285 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4286 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4287 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4288 involving hard-linked directories
4289 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4290 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4291 character-special and block files
4294 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4295 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4296 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4297 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4298 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4299 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4300 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4301 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4302 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4304 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4305 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4306 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4307 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4308 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4309 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4310 specified on the command line.
4311 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4312 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4313 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4314 the first file untouched.
4315 * readlink: new program
4316 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4317 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4318 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4319 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4320 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4321 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4324 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4325 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4326 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4327 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4328 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4329 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4330 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4331 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4332 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4333 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4334 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4335 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4337 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4338 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4339 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4341 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4342 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4343 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4344 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4345 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4346 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4347 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4348 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4351 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4352 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4355 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4356 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4357 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4358 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4359 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4360 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4361 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4364 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4365 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4367 ========================================================================
4368 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4369 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4372 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4374 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4375 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4376 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4377 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4378 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4379 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4380 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4381 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4382 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4383 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4384 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4385 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4387 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4388 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4389 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4390 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4392 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4395 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4397 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4398 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4399 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4400 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4401 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4402 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4403 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4406 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4407 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4408 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4409 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4410 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4411 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4412 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4413 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4414 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4415 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4416 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4417 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4418 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4419 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4420 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4421 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4423 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4424 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4426 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4427 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4428 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4429 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4430 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4431 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4433 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4434 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4435 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4436 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4437 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4438 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4439 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4441 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4442 the source files in the following example:
4443 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4444 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4445 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4446 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4447 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4448 links between source files with --preserve=links
4449 * cp accepts new options:
4450 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4451 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4452 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4453 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4454 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4455 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4456 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4457 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4458 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4460 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4461 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4462 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4463 even though it's older than dest.
4464 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4465 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4466 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4467 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4468 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4470 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4471 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4472 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4473 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4474 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4475 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4476 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4478 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
4479 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4480 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
4482 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
4483 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4484 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4485 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4486 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4487 This is the default.
4489 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4490 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4491 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4492 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4493 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4495 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4498 ========================================================================
4499 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4500 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4503 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4504 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4506 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4507 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4508 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4509 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4510 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4512 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4513 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4514 that specifies a non-directory
4517 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4518 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4519 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4520 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4521 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4522 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4523 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4524 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4525 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4526 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4527 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4528 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4529 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4530 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4531 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4532 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4533 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4534 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4535 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4536 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4537 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4538 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4539 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4540 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4542 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4543 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4544 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4546 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4548 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4549 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4551 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4552 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4553 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4554 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4555 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4557 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4558 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4559 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4560 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4561 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4563 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4565 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4566 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4567 * still more portability fixes
4568 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4569 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4571 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4573 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4575 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4577 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4578 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4579 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4580 there is any time remaining
4581 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4583 ========================================================================
4584 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4585 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4587 This package began as the union of the following:
4588 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4590 ========================================================================
4592 Copyright (C) 2001-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4594 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4595 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4596 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4597 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4598 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4599 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.