1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
8 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
9 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
10 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
12 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
13 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
14 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
15 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
16 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
18 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
19 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
20 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
21 now fails instead of losing the data.
22 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
24 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
25 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
26 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
28 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
29 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
32 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
33 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
36 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
37 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
38 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
40 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
41 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
44 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
45 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
46 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
48 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
49 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
50 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
52 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
53 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
56 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
59 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
60 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
61 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
63 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
64 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
66 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
67 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
68 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
69 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
71 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
72 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
73 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
75 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
76 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
79 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
80 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
84 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
85 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
86 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
88 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
89 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
91 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
92 executing the subsidiary program.
94 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
98 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
100 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped
101 and the reader of the pipe terminates.
103 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
104 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
105 is effective in this case.
108 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
112 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
113 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
114 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
116 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
117 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
118 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
120 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
121 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
122 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
124 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
125 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
128 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
129 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
130 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
132 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
133 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
134 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
135 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
136 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
138 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
139 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
140 depending on the size of the first file processed.
141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
145 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
146 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
147 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
148 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
150 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
151 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
152 time zone is indeterminate.
154 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
155 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
156 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
157 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
159 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
160 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
161 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
163 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
164 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
166 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
167 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
168 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
172 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
173 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
174 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
177 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
181 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
182 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
185 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
186 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
187 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
189 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
190 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
191 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
192 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
193 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
195 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
196 System V style platforms where this information is available only
197 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
199 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
200 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
202 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
203 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
204 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
206 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
207 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
208 defaults to a different SELinux context.
210 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
211 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
213 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
214 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
215 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
217 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
218 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
220 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
221 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
222 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
224 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
226 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
227 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
229 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
230 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
232 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
233 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
235 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
236 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
238 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
239 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
240 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
241 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
243 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
244 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
245 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
247 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
248 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
249 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
251 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
252 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
253 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
255 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
256 only doing so if --retry is specified.
257 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
259 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
260 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
262 ** Changes in behavior
264 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
266 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
267 values for any argument.
269 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
270 they are out of localtime range.
272 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
273 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
274 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
275 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
279 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
280 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
281 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
283 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
284 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
286 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
287 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
289 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
291 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
292 written to a terminal.
294 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
295 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
297 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
298 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
299 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
300 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
301 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
302 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
303 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
304 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
305 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
306 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
307 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
309 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
310 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
314 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
315 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
319 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
321 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
322 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
324 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
327 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
331 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
332 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
333 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
334 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
336 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
337 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
339 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
340 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
341 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
343 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
346 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
347 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
348 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
350 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
353 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
354 that specify an offset for the first field.
355 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
357 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
362 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
363 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
367 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
368 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
370 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
371 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
372 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
373 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
374 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
376 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
377 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
378 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
380 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
381 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
382 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
384 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
385 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
387 ** Changes in behavior
389 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
390 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
392 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
393 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
395 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
396 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
398 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
399 when outputting to a terminal.
401 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
405 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
406 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
408 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
409 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
411 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
412 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
413 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
415 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
416 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
418 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
419 upon detection of a directory cycle.
420 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
422 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
424 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
425 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
426 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
428 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
429 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
432 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
436 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
437 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
439 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
442 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
443 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
446 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
447 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
448 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
449 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
451 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
452 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
453 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
454 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
456 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
457 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
459 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
460 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
462 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
463 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
464 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
466 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
467 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
468 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
470 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
471 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
472 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
474 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
475 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
476 character at the 4GiB position.
477 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
479 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
480 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
482 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
483 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
485 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
486 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
489 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
492 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
493 replaced before inotify watches were created.
494 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
496 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
497 [bug introduced in the beginning]
499 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
500 when those files are being created or renamed.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
505 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
506 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
507 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
508 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
510 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
511 on stderr approximately every second.
513 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
514 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
516 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
517 other than the default newline character.
519 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
520 a useful setting with high latency links.
522 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
523 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
525 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
526 and output errors in general.
528 ** Changes in behavior
530 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
531 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
532 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
533 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
535 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
536 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
537 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
538 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
539 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
541 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
542 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
544 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
546 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
547 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
549 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
550 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
554 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
555 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
557 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
558 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
560 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
561 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
563 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
564 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
566 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
568 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
569 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
570 documentation are provided.
573 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
577 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
578 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
580 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
581 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
582 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
585 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
586 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
587 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
588 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
590 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
591 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
593 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
594 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
596 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
597 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
598 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
599 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
600 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
601 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
615 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
617 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
618 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
619 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
620 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
621 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
622 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
624 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
625 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
626 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
627 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
629 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
630 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
631 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
633 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
634 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
635 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
636 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
638 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
639 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
640 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
642 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
643 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
644 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
646 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
647 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
648 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
649 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
650 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
652 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
653 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
654 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
656 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
657 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
659 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
660 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
661 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
663 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
664 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
666 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
667 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
669 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
670 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
672 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
673 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
675 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
676 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
677 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
679 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
680 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
684 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
685 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
687 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
688 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
689 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
690 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
691 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
692 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
693 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
694 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
695 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
696 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
697 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
698 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
699 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
700 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
701 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
702 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
703 it suitable for embedded system.
705 ** Changes in behavior
707 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
708 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
710 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
711 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
713 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
714 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
715 will result in the delayed output of lines.
717 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
718 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
719 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
723 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
724 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
725 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
727 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
729 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
730 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
731 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
733 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
734 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
735 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
736 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
738 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
739 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
741 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
742 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
743 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
746 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
750 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
751 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
752 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
754 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
755 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
756 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
757 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
759 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
760 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
761 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
763 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
764 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
766 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
768 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
769 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
770 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
772 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
773 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
774 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
776 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
777 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
778 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
779 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
781 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
782 from the source, when copying across file systems.
783 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
785 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
786 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
787 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
789 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
790 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
792 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
793 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
794 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
795 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
797 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
798 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
799 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
801 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
802 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
803 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
807 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
808 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
809 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
811 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
812 used to identify the split points.
814 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
815 command line argument through to the output.
817 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
820 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
821 a NUL instead of a white space character.
823 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
824 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
826 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
828 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
829 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
830 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
832 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
833 unique groups with empty lines.
835 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
836 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
838 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
841 ** Changes in behavior
843 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
844 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
845 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
846 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
848 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
849 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
851 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
852 not just the transfer counts.
854 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
856 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
857 as per the documented interface.
861 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
863 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
864 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
865 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
866 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
868 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
869 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
870 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
871 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
873 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
874 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
875 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
877 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
878 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
880 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
881 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
883 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
887 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
890 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
894 numfmt: reformat numbers
898 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
899 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
900 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
902 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
903 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
904 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
906 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
907 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
911 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
912 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
914 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
915 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
916 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
918 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
919 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
920 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
922 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
923 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
924 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
926 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
927 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
928 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
930 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
931 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
932 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
934 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
935 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
937 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
938 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
940 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
941 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
942 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
944 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
945 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
946 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
948 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
949 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
950 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
952 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
953 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
954 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
955 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
957 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
958 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
959 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
961 ** Changes in behavior
963 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
964 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
965 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
966 'total' in the target column.
968 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
969 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
970 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
972 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
973 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
975 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
976 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
980 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
981 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
983 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
984 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
986 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
990 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
991 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
992 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
993 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
994 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
995 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
996 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
997 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
998 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
999 for a patched distribution package.
1001 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1002 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1004 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1005 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1006 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1007 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1010 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1014 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1016 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1017 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1018 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1022 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1023 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1024 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1025 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1026 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1028 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1029 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1031 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1032 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1033 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1034 eventually exits nonzero.
1036 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1037 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1038 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1039 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1040 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1042 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1043 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1046 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1047 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1048 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1050 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1051 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1052 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1054 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1055 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1056 Before, this would infloop:
1057 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1058 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1060 ** Changes in behavior
1062 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1066 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1067 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1068 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1069 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1070 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1073 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1074 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1075 format-changing options.
1077 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1078 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1079 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1080 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1081 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1085 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1086 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1087 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1088 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1089 are run without following the instructions in README.
1091 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1092 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1093 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1094 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1095 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1096 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1097 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1100 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1104 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1105 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1106 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1107 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1109 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1110 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1111 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1112 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1114 sort -u could read freed memory.
1115 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1116 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1117 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1121 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1122 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1123 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1124 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1127 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1131 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1132 processes will not intersperse their output.
1133 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1135 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1136 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1137 date: invalid date '\260'
1138 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1140 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1141 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1142 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1143 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1145 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1146 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1147 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1149 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1150 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1151 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1152 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1153 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1154 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1156 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1157 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1159 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1160 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1162 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1163 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1164 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1166 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1167 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1168 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1172 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1174 ** Changes in behavior
1176 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1177 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1178 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1179 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1180 have any reason to include it here.
1184 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1185 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1186 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1188 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1189 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1190 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1193 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1197 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1198 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1199 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1200 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1201 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1202 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1204 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1205 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1206 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1207 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1208 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1209 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1210 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1212 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1213 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1215 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1216 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1220 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1221 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1223 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1225 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1227 ** Changes in behavior
1229 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1230 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1231 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1233 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1234 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1237 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1241 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1242 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1243 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1244 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1245 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1246 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1247 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1248 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1250 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1251 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1252 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1253 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1254 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1256 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1257 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1259 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1260 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1262 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1263 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1265 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1266 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1268 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1269 additional static suffix to output file names.
1271 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1272 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1273 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1275 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1276 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1280 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1281 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1282 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1284 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1285 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1286 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1287 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1288 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1289 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1291 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1292 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1293 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1294 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1295 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1297 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1298 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1299 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1300 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1304 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1305 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1306 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1308 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1309 instead of causing a usage failure.
1311 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1314 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1318 realpath: print resolved file names.
1322 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1323 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1325 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1326 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1328 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1329 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1330 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1331 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1332 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1333 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1335 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1336 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1337 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1339 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1340 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1341 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1343 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1344 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1345 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1346 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1349 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1351 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1352 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1354 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1355 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1356 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1358 ** Changes in behavior
1360 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1361 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1362 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1363 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1364 usually-short referent instead.
1366 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1367 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1368 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1369 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1372 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1376 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1377 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1378 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1380 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1381 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1383 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1384 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1388 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1389 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1391 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1392 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1393 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1394 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1396 ** Changes in behavior
1398 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1399 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1400 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1404 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1405 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1406 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1409 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1413 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1414 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1415 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1417 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1418 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1420 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1421 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1422 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1423 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1424 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1426 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1427 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1428 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1429 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1430 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1431 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1432 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1433 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1435 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1436 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1438 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1439 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1441 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1442 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1444 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1445 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1446 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1448 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1449 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1450 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1451 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1453 ** Changes in behavior
1455 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1456 when -v or -c specified.
1458 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1459 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1463 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1464 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1465 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1466 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1467 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1469 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1470 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1471 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1473 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1474 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1475 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1476 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1477 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1478 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1479 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1481 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1482 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1483 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1487 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1488 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1490 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1493 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1494 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1496 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1497 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1499 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1500 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1502 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1504 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1508 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1509 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1511 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1514 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1518 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1519 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1521 ** Changes in behavior
1523 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1524 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1525 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1526 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1527 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1528 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1529 resolved for 2.6.39.
1530 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1531 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1532 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1536 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1539 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1543 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1544 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1545 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1547 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1548 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1549 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1551 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1552 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1553 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1555 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1556 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1558 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1559 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1561 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1562 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1564 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1565 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1569 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1570 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1571 processed portion thereof.
1573 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1574 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1576 ** Changes in behavior
1578 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1579 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1580 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1582 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1583 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1584 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1586 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1587 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1589 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1590 Use --preserve-context instead.
1592 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1595 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1599 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1600 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1601 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1602 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1603 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1605 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1606 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1608 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1609 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1610 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1612 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1613 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1615 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1616 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1620 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1621 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1622 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1623 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1624 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1625 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1626 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1627 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1629 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1630 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1631 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1633 ** Changes in behavior
1635 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1636 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1637 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1640 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1644 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1645 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1646 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1649 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1653 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1654 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1656 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1657 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1659 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1660 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1662 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1663 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1664 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1665 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1667 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1668 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1670 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1671 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1672 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1674 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1676 ** Changes in behavior
1678 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1679 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1680 to the number of available processors.
1684 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1687 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1691 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1692 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1693 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1694 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1696 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1697 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1698 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1700 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1701 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1703 ** Changes in behavior
1705 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1706 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1708 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1709 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1710 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1711 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1712 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1713 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1715 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1716 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1717 the same way as the others.
1719 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1720 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1723 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1727 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1728 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1729 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1731 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1732 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1734 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1735 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1736 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1738 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1739 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1741 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1742 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1744 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1745 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1746 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1748 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1749 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1750 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1751 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1755 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1756 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1758 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1761 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1762 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1764 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1766 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1767 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1768 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1770 ** Changes in behavior
1772 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1773 rather than its aliased target.
1775 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1776 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1777 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1779 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1780 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1781 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1782 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1783 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1784 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1785 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1786 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1788 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1790 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1792 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1793 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1796 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1797 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1798 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1799 control like taskset for example.
1801 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1803 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1804 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1805 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1806 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1807 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1808 includes %C when context information is available.
1810 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1811 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1812 rather than a file system attribute.
1814 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1815 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1816 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1817 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1819 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1820 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1821 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1823 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1824 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1825 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1828 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1832 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1833 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1835 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1837 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1838 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1840 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1841 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1842 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1843 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1845 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1846 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1847 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1851 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1852 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1854 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1855 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1856 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1858 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1859 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1860 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1861 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1862 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1863 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1864 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1865 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1866 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1868 ** Changes in behavior
1870 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1871 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1873 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1874 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1877 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1881 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1882 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1883 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1884 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1888 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1889 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1891 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1892 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1893 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1894 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1896 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1897 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1898 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1901 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1905 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1906 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1907 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1909 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1910 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1911 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1913 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1914 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1916 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1917 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1918 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1919 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1921 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1922 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1923 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1925 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1926 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1927 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1928 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1930 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1931 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1932 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1934 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1935 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1936 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1937 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1939 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1940 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1941 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1943 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1944 processes will not intersperse their output.
1945 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1948 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1952 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1953 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1955 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1956 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1958 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1959 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1960 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1961 the presence of the empty string argument.
1962 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1964 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1965 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1966 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1967 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1969 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1970 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1972 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1973 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1974 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1976 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1977 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1978 and with a malicious user on the same system
1979 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1980 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1983 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1987 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1988 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1989 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1991 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1992 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1993 offending directory and all "contents."
1995 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1996 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1997 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1999 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2000 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2001 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2003 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2004 processes will not intersperse their output.
2005 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2006 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2008 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2009 output the name of the file to stdout.
2010 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2012 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2013 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2014 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2016 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2017 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2020 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2021 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2022 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2024 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2025 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2026 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2027 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2028 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2029 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2031 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2032 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2033 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2034 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2036 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2037 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2039 ** Changes in behavior
2041 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2042 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2043 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2044 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2045 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2047 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2048 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2049 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2050 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2052 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2054 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2055 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2056 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2057 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2058 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2062 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2066 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2067 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2069 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2070 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2072 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2073 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2074 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2076 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2077 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2080 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2084 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2085 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2086 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2088 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2089 to accommodate leap seconds.
2090 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2092 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2093 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2094 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2096 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2098 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2099 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2100 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2102 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2103 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2104 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2105 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2106 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2110 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2111 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2112 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2113 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2115 ** Changes in behavior
2117 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2118 environment variable is set.
2120 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2121 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2122 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2126 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2127 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2128 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2129 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2131 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2132 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2133 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2134 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2138 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2139 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2140 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2142 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2143 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2144 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2145 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2146 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2147 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2148 another improvement:
2150 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2151 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2154 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2158 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2159 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2160 and libraries tested at configure time.
2161 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2163 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2164 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2166 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2167 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2169 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2170 printing a summary to stderr.
2171 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2173 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2174 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2175 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2177 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2178 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2180 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2181 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2182 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2183 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2185 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2186 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2187 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2188 which is relatively unusual.
2189 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2191 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2192 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2193 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2194 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2195 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2196 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2197 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2201 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2202 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2203 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2204 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2205 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2209 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2210 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2212 ** Changes in behavior
2214 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2215 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2216 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2217 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2218 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2221 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2225 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2226 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2228 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2229 before data copying has started.
2231 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2232 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2234 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2235 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2236 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2237 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2239 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2240 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2241 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2242 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2244 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2249 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2250 for its standard streams.
2252 ** Changes in behavior
2254 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2255 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2256 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2257 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2258 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2259 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2261 ** Deprecated options
2263 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2264 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2268 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2270 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2271 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2272 a btrfs file system.
2274 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2276 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2277 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2279 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2280 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2283 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2287 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2288 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2289 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2290 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2292 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2293 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2294 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2295 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2296 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2301 make check: two tests have been corrected
2305 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2306 inherited from gnulib.
2309 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2313 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2314 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2315 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2316 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2318 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2319 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2321 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2323 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2324 systems without xattr support.
2326 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2327 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2328 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2330 ** Changes in behavior
2332 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2333 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2334 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2335 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2337 ** Improved robustness
2339 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2340 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2341 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2342 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2343 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2344 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2345 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2346 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2347 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2351 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2352 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2354 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2355 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2356 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2357 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2358 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2361 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2365 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2366 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2367 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2371 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2372 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2373 data was read, or on process exit.
2374 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2376 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2377 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2378 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2379 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2381 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2382 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2383 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2384 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2386 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2387 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2389 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2390 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2392 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2393 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2394 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2396 ** Changes in behavior
2398 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2399 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2400 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2402 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2403 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2405 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2406 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2407 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2410 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2414 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2416 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2417 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2418 install: Never copies xattrs
2420 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2421 from overwriting any existing destination file
2423 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2424 mode where this feature is available.
2426 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2427 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2428 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2429 do not modify the destination at all.
2431 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2433 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2437 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2438 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2440 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2442 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2443 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2445 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2446 processing the first file name
2448 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2449 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2450 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2451 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2453 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2454 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2456 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2457 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2460 ** Changes in behavior
2462 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2463 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2465 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2466 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2467 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2469 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2470 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2472 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2474 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2475 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2476 is still marked with a '+'.
2479 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2483 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2484 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2488 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2489 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2490 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2491 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2492 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2493 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2495 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2496 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2498 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2499 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2501 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2503 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2504 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2505 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2507 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2508 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2510 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2511 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2512 used to factor large numbers.
2514 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2517 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2519 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2521 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2522 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2524 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2525 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2526 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2527 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2529 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2530 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2531 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2533 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2534 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2538 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2540 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2541 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2543 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2544 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2546 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2548 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2549 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2553 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2554 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2555 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2557 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2559 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2560 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2561 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2563 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2564 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2565 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2567 ** Changes in behavior
2569 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2570 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2573 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2577 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2578 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2579 'futimens' system calls.
2583 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2585 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2586 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2587 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2589 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2590 with no USERNAME argument.
2592 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2593 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2594 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2596 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2597 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2598 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2599 number of fields for some inputs.
2601 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2602 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2604 ** Changes in behavior
2606 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2607 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2610 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2614 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2616 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2617 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2618 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2619 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2621 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2622 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2624 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2625 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2627 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2628 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2630 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2631 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2632 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2633 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2635 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2636 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2637 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2638 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2639 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2640 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2642 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2643 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2645 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2646 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2647 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2649 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2650 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2652 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2653 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2655 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2656 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2657 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2658 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2660 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2661 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2663 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2664 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2666 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2667 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2668 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2672 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2673 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2675 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2676 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2677 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2678 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2682 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2683 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2685 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2687 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2691 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2692 which have negative errno values.
2696 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2700 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2704 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2705 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2708 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2712 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2713 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2714 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2716 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2717 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2718 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2719 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2723 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2724 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2725 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2726 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2729 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2733 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2735 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2736 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2737 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2740 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2744 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2745 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2747 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2749 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2751 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2753 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2757 ** Changes in behavior
2759 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2760 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2762 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2763 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2765 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2766 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2767 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2771 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2772 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2773 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2774 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2775 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2776 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2777 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2778 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2779 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2780 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2781 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2783 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2784 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2785 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2788 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2791 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2792 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2793 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2795 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2796 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2797 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2800 ** New build options
2802 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2803 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2804 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2805 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2807 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2808 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2809 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2810 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2811 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2812 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2813 of "make check" fail.
2815 ** Remove deprecated options
2817 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2818 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2819 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2820 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2821 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2823 ** Improved robustness
2825 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2826 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2827 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2828 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2829 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2830 loss of the contents of a/f.
2832 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2833 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2837 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2838 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2839 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2841 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2842 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2843 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2844 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2846 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2847 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2848 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2849 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2850 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2851 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2852 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2853 destination is a symlink.
2855 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2857 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2858 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2860 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2861 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2863 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2865 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2866 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2868 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2869 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2871 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2874 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2875 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2877 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2878 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2880 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2881 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2882 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2883 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2885 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2886 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2887 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2889 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2890 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2891 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2893 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2894 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2895 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2896 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2898 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2899 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2900 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2902 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2903 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2905 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2906 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2908 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2910 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2911 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2912 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2914 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2915 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2917 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2918 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2920 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2921 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2923 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2924 [present in the original version]
2927 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2931 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2933 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2934 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2935 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2937 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2938 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2940 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2944 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2945 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2947 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2948 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2950 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2951 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2953 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2954 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2955 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2956 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2957 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2958 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2960 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2961 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2964 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2965 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2967 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2970 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2971 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2972 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2974 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2975 directory is unreadable.
2977 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2978 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2979 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2981 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2982 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2983 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2984 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2985 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2988 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2989 Before it would print nothing.
2991 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2993 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2994 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2995 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2996 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2997 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2998 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2999 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3000 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3002 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3006 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3007 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3008 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3010 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3011 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3012 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3013 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3016 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3020 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3021 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3022 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3023 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3024 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3025 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3026 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3028 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3029 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3030 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3031 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3032 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3033 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3034 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3035 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3037 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3038 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3039 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3042 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3046 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3047 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3049 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3050 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3051 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3053 ** Improved robustness
3055 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3056 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3057 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3060 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3064 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3065 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3066 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3067 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3068 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3070 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3074 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3077 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3081 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3082 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3083 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3084 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3086 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3087 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3089 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3090 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3091 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3094 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3096 ** Improved robustness
3098 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3099 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3101 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3102 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3103 or NFS-mounted partition.
3105 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3106 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3110 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3111 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3112 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3113 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3114 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3115 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3117 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3118 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3120 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3121 or neglect to report file removal.
3123 For the "groups" command:
3125 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3126 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3128 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3130 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3132 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3136 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3137 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3140 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3142 ** Changes in behavior
3144 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3145 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3146 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3147 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3149 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3150 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3151 a final './' or '../' component.
3153 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3154 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3155 this only for pipes.
3157 ** Infrastructure changes
3159 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3160 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3161 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3162 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3166 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3167 name is "." or "..".
3169 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3170 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3171 dirent.d_type support.
3173 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3174 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3176 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3177 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3178 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3179 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3182 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3184 ** Changes in behavior
3186 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3190 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3191 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3195 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3196 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3197 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3199 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3200 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3202 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3203 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3205 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3207 ** Improved robustness
3209 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3210 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3211 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3213 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3214 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3217 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3218 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3220 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3221 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3223 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3224 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3226 ** Changes in behavior
3228 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3229 where the two are distinct.
3231 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3232 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3233 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3234 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3235 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3236 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3237 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3238 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3239 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3240 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3241 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3242 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3243 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3244 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3245 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3246 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3247 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3249 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3250 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3251 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3253 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3254 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3255 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3256 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3259 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3260 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3264 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3265 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3266 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3267 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3269 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3270 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3271 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3273 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3274 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3275 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3276 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3277 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3280 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3281 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3283 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3284 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3285 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3286 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3288 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3289 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3290 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3292 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3293 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3294 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3295 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3297 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3298 and sticky) with the -m option.
3300 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3301 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3302 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3303 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3304 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3306 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3307 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3309 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3313 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3314 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3315 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3316 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3318 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3320 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3322 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3323 silently ignoring one of them.
3325 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3326 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3327 containing this change was 5.92.
3329 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3330 automatically newline terminated.
3332 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3333 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3334 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3335 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3338 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3339 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3340 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3343 ** Scheduled for removal
3345 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3346 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3348 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3349 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3350 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3351 command to unlink a directory.
3353 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3354 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3355 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3356 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3360 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3361 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3362 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3363 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3364 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3365 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3369 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3370 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3372 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3374 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3375 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3376 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3378 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3379 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3382 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3383 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3385 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3386 list directories before files.
3388 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3389 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3390 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3391 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3394 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3396 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3398 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3399 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3400 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3402 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3403 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3407 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3408 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3409 usually printing nothing.
3411 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3413 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3414 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3415 them with hard-linked directories.
3417 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3418 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3419 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3421 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3422 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3423 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3425 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3428 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3429 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3431 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3432 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3434 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3435 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3437 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3438 all command-line arguments.
3440 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3442 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3444 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3445 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3447 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3449 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3450 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3451 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3452 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3453 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3455 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3456 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3458 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3459 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3460 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3461 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3463 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3465 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3469 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3470 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3472 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3473 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3475 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3476 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3478 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3479 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3481 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3482 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3484 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3486 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3487 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3488 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3491 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3493 ** Build-related bug fixes
3495 installing .mo files would fail
3498 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3502 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3504 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3507 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3511 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3512 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3516 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3518 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3519 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3521 ** Deprecated options
3523 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3524 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3526 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3530 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3532 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3533 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3534 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3535 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3537 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3540 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3546 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3551 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3553 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3555 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3556 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3557 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3559 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3560 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3561 problematic usages. These include:
3563 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3564 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3565 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3566 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3567 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3568 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3569 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3570 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3571 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3573 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3574 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3576 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3577 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3578 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3579 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3581 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3582 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3583 between binary and text files.
3585 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3589 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3593 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3594 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3596 head tac tail tee tr
3597 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3599 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3600 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3602 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3603 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3604 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3606 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3608 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3610 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3611 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3612 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3616 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3618 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3619 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3621 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3622 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3623 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3627 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3628 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3632 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3633 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3634 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3638 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3639 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3643 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3645 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3647 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3651 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3652 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3653 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3655 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3656 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3657 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3658 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3659 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3661 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3665 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3666 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3667 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3669 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3671 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3672 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3673 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3674 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3676 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3678 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3679 rather than silently wrapping around.
3681 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3682 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3684 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3685 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3687 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3688 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3689 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3690 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3692 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3694 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3696 ** Improved robustness
3698 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3699 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3700 no matter how large the result.
3702 ** Improved portability
3704 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3705 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3707 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3709 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3710 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3711 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3713 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3714 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3718 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3719 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3721 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3723 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3724 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3725 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3726 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3728 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3729 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3731 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3732 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3733 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3735 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3737 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3738 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3740 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3741 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3743 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3745 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3746 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3748 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3749 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3751 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3752 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3753 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3755 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3757 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3759 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3763 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3765 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3766 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3767 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3769 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3770 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3772 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3773 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3774 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3776 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3777 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3779 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3780 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3781 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3782 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3784 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3785 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3787 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3788 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3789 the file system does not support it.
3791 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3793 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3794 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3796 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3798 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3799 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3801 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3802 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3803 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3804 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3806 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3807 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3810 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3811 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3812 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3813 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3815 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3816 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3817 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3818 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3820 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3821 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3823 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3825 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3826 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3827 reporting incorrect results.
3831 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3832 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3834 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3837 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3839 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3840 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3842 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3843 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3845 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3848 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3849 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3850 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3851 the file name does not look like a page range.
3853 printf has several changes:
3855 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3856 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3858 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3859 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3860 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3862 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3863 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3866 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3867 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3869 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3870 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3872 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3874 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3875 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3877 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3879 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3881 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3882 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3883 when first encountering the directory.
3887 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3888 output; POSIX requires this.
3890 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3891 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3893 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3895 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3896 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3898 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3899 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3901 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3902 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3903 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3904 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3905 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3906 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3907 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3909 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3910 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3911 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3913 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3914 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3916 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3918 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3920 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3921 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3922 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3923 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3925 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3929 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3930 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3931 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3932 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3933 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3935 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3936 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3937 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3939 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3940 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3942 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3943 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3945 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3946 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
3947 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
3948 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3949 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
3951 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3952 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3954 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3955 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3957 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3959 nocreat do not create the output file
3960 excl fail if the output file already exists
3961 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3962 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3964 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3966 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3967 direct use direct I/O for data
3968 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3969 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3970 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3971 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3972 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3974 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3976 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3977 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3980 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3981 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3982 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3983 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3984 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3985 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3987 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3988 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3990 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3993 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3995 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3997 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3998 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4000 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4001 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4002 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4004 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4005 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4006 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4008 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4010 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4011 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4013 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4014 for compatibility with bash.
4016 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4018 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4019 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4020 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4021 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4023 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4024 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4026 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4027 ls supports TABSIZE.
4028 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4029 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4030 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4032 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4035 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4037 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4038 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4039 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4040 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4041 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4042 an offset, not as a file name.
4044 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4045 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4047 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4048 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4050 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4051 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4053 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4054 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4055 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4057 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4058 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4060 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4061 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4065 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4067 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4069 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4073 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4074 or more arguments between partitions.
4076 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4077 holes in the destination.
4079 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4080 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4081 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4082 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4083 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4084 terminates immediately.
4086 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4088 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4090 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4091 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4092 not the empty string.
4094 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4095 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4099 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4100 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4101 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4104 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4111 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4115 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4116 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4118 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4119 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4121 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4122 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4123 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4126 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4130 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4131 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4133 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4134 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4136 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4137 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4138 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4140 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4142 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4145 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4147 ** Configuration option
4149 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4150 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4154 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4155 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4159 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4160 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4161 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4164 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4165 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4166 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4167 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4168 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4169 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4170 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4173 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4177 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4178 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4179 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4181 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4182 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4184 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4186 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4187 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4188 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4189 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4191 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4193 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4194 not just the ones that reference directories
4196 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4197 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4199 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4200 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4201 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4203 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4204 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4205 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4206 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4207 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4208 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4210 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4215 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4216 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4218 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4220 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4222 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4224 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4225 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4227 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4228 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4230 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4232 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4236 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4238 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4240 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4241 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4242 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4243 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4244 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4246 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4247 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4249 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4250 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4252 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4253 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4255 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4256 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4257 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4261 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4262 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4263 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4264 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4265 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4266 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4267 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4268 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4269 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4270 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4271 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4272 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4273 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4274 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4276 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4278 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4279 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4281 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4283 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4285 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4286 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4288 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4290 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4291 without a trailing newline.
4293 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4294 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4296 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4299 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4303 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4305 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4307 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4308 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4309 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4310 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4312 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4314 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4315 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4316 be printed without leading spaces.
4318 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4319 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4324 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4325 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4326 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4328 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4330 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4331 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4333 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4334 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4336 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4337 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4339 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4341 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4343 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4345 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4346 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4348 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4350 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4352 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4353 byte offsets are specified.
4356 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4359 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4362 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4363 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4364 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4365 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4366 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4367 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4368 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4369 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4370 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4371 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4372 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4373 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4374 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4375 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4376 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4377 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4378 directory where M has write access.
4379 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4380 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4381 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4384 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4385 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4386 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4387 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4388 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4389 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4390 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4391 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4392 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4393 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4394 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4395 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4396 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4397 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4398 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4399 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4400 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4401 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4402 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4403 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4404 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4405 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4406 appeared one additional time.
4408 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4409 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4410 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4411 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4414 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4415 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4416 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4417 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4418 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4419 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4420 if there were more than 338.
4422 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4423 - false --help now exits nonzero
4426 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4427 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4428 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4429 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4432 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4433 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4434 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4435 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4436 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4439 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4440 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4441 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4442 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4443 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4444 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4445 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4448 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4449 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4450 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4451 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4452 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4453 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4455 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4456 under certain unusual conditions
4457 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4458 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4461 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4462 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4463 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4464 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4465 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4466 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4467 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4468 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4469 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4470 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4471 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4472 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4473 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4474 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4475 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4476 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4479 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4480 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4483 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4484 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4485 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4486 involving hard-linked directories
4487 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4488 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4489 character-special and block files
4492 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4493 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4494 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4495 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4496 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4497 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4498 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4499 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4500 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4502 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4503 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4504 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4505 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4506 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4507 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4508 specified on the command line.
4509 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4510 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4511 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4512 the first file untouched.
4513 * readlink: new program
4514 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4515 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4516 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4517 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4518 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4519 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4522 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4523 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4524 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4525 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4526 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4527 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4528 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4529 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4530 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4531 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4532 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4533 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4535 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4536 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4537 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4539 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4540 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4541 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4542 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4543 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4544 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4545 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4546 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4549 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4550 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4553 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4554 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4555 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4556 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4557 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4558 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4559 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4562 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4563 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4565 ========================================================================
4566 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4567 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4570 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4572 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4573 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4574 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4575 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4576 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4577 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4578 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4579 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4580 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4581 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4582 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4583 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4585 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4586 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4587 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4588 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4590 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4593 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4595 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4596 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4597 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4598 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4599 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4600 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4601 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4604 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4605 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4606 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4607 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4608 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4609 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4610 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4611 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4612 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4613 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4614 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4615 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4616 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4617 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4618 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4619 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4621 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4622 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4624 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4625 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4626 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4627 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4628 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4629 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4631 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4632 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4633 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4634 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4635 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4636 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4637 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4639 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4640 the source files in the following example:
4641 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4642 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4643 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4644 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4645 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4646 links between source files with --preserve=links
4647 * cp accepts new options:
4648 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4649 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4650 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4651 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4652 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4653 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4654 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4655 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4656 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4658 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4659 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4660 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4661 even though it's older than dest.
4662 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4663 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4664 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4665 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4666 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4668 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4669 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4670 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4671 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4672 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4673 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4674 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4676 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4677 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4678 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4680 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4681 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4682 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4683 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4684 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4685 This is the default.
4687 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4688 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4689 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4690 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4691 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4693 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4696 ========================================================================
4697 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4698 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4701 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4702 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4704 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4705 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4706 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4707 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4708 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4710 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4711 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4712 that specifies a non-directory
4715 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4716 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4717 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4718 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4719 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4720 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4721 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4722 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4723 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4724 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4725 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4726 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4727 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4728 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4729 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4730 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4731 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4732 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4733 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4734 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4735 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4736 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4737 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4738 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4740 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4741 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4742 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4744 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4746 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4747 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4749 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4750 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4751 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4752 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4753 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4755 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4756 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4757 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4758 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4759 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4761 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4763 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4764 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4765 * still more portability fixes
4766 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4767 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4769 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4771 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4773 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4775 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4776 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4777 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4778 there is any time remaining
4779 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4781 ========================================================================
4782 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4783 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4785 This package began as the union of the following:
4786 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4788 ========================================================================
4790 Copyright (C) 2001-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4792 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4793 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4794 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4795 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4796 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4797 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.