1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
8 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
9 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
11 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
12 presented with malformed checksum lines.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
15 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
16 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
19 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
22 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
23 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
24 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
27 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
28 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
31 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
32 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
34 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
35 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
36 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
39 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
40 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
42 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
43 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
44 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
47 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
48 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
50 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
51 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
52 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
54 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD.
55 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
57 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
58 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
59 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
61 ** Changes in behavior
63 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
64 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
65 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
67 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
68 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
69 checksum utilities with cksum.
71 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
72 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
73 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
74 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
75 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
76 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
80 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
81 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
82 reinstating that behaviour from coreutils-9.0.
84 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
85 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
87 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
88 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
90 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
92 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
94 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
95 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
96 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
97 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
98 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
99 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
102 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
106 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
107 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
108 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
109 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
110 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
112 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
113 Previousy it may have issued "File exists" errors when
114 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
115 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
117 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
118 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
119 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
121 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
122 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
123 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
124 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
126 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
127 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
129 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
130 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
133 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
134 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
135 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
136 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
138 ** Changes in behavior
140 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
141 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
142 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
143 due to -n, -i, or -u.
147 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
148 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
149 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
152 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
156 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
157 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
158 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
159 total line in this case.
160 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
162 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
163 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
164 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
166 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
167 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
169 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
170 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
171 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
174 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
175 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
176 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
177 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
178 which may have resulted in data corruption.
179 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
181 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
182 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
183 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
185 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
186 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
188 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
189 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
190 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
192 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
193 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
194 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
196 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
197 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
198 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
200 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
201 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
202 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
203 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
204 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
206 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
207 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
208 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
209 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
210 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
212 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
213 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
214 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
216 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
217 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
218 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
220 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
221 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
222 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
225 ** Changes in behavior
227 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
228 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
229 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
230 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
231 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
232 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
234 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
235 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
237 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
238 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
239 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
240 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
242 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
243 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
244 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
246 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
247 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
248 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
249 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
251 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
252 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
253 This behavior is now documented.
255 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
256 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
258 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
259 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
260 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
262 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
263 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
264 from errors from the invoked command.
266 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
267 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
268 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
271 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
275 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
276 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
278 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
279 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
281 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
282 print details on how a file is being copied.
284 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
285 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
287 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
288 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
290 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
291 asked to move a file to a different file system.
293 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
294 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
296 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
297 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
299 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
300 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
304 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
305 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
306 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
307 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
308 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
310 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
311 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
313 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
314 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
316 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
317 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
318 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
320 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
321 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
322 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
324 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
325 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
327 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
328 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
329 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
330 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
333 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
337 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
338 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
339 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
341 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
342 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
343 before adjusting it to the correct value.
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
346 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
347 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
348 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
350 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
351 and B is in some other file system.
352 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
354 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
355 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
356 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
358 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
361 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
362 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
363 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
364 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
365 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
367 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
368 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
371 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
372 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
373 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
375 ** Changes in behavior
377 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
378 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
379 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
381 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
382 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
383 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
384 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
386 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
387 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
389 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
390 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
391 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
393 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
394 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
396 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
397 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
398 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
399 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
400 though they still work.
402 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
403 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
404 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
406 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
407 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
409 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
410 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
411 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
413 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
414 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
415 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
416 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
420 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
421 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
423 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
424 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
426 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
427 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
431 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
432 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
434 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
435 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
436 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
439 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
441 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
442 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
443 since synchronizing can take a long time.
445 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
447 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
448 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
450 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
452 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
453 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
454 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
458 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
462 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
466 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
467 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
469 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
470 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
471 is a non regular file.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
474 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
475 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
476 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
478 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
481 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
482 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
484 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
485 heavily changed during the run.
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
488 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
489 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
491 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
494 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
495 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
497 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
498 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
500 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
501 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
502 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
504 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
507 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
508 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
510 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
511 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
512 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
514 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
515 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
518 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
519 invalid combinations of case character classes.
520 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
522 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
523 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
524 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
526 ** Changes in behavior
528 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
529 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
531 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
532 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
533 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
535 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
536 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
537 that was made in release 8.32.
539 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
540 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
541 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
543 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
544 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
546 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
547 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
551 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
552 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
553 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
554 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
556 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
558 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
559 when verifying tagged format checksums.
561 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
563 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
564 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
566 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
567 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
569 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
570 NUL instead of newline.
572 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
574 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
575 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
576 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
580 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
581 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
583 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
584 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
585 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
587 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
588 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
590 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
591 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
593 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
594 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
596 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
597 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
598 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
600 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
602 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
603 where avx2 instructions are supported.
604 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
607 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
611 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
612 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
613 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
615 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
616 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
617 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
618 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
619 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
621 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
622 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
623 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
624 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
625 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
626 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
628 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
629 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
631 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
632 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
633 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
636 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
637 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
638 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
641 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
642 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
644 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
645 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
646 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
647 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
649 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
650 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
651 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
653 ** Changes in behavior
655 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
656 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
657 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
658 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
659 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
662 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
663 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
664 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
665 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
666 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
667 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
668 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
669 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
672 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
673 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
674 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
675 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
677 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
678 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
679 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
681 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
682 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
686 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
687 file creation time, where available.
689 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
690 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
692 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
693 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
694 useful on network file systems.
698 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
699 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
701 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
702 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
703 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
707 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
710 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
714 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
715 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
717 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
718 after asking the user whether to proceed.
719 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
721 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
722 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
724 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
725 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
728 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
729 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
730 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
731 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
732 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
733 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
735 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
736 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
738 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
739 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
741 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
742 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
743 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
745 ** Changes in behavior
747 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
748 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
749 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
750 end-of-options marker.
752 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
755 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
756 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
758 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
759 environment variable is set.
761 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
762 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
763 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
764 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
765 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
767 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
769 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
770 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
771 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
772 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
774 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
775 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
779 id now supports specifying multiple users.
781 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
782 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
784 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
785 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
786 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
787 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
788 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
789 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
791 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
792 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
794 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
795 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
797 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
798 signal handling before executing a program.
802 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
803 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
804 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
808 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
809 which is common in Asian locales.
811 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
812 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
814 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
815 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
818 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
822 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
823 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
824 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
825 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
826 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
827 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
829 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
830 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
831 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
832 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
834 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
835 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
836 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
837 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
838 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
839 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
841 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
842 even if it can't be traversed.
843 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
845 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
846 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
847 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
849 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
850 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
852 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
853 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
854 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
855 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
856 now silently does nothing if A exists.
857 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
859 ** Changes in behavior
861 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
862 it is self referential.
864 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
868 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
870 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
871 each processing step.
873 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
874 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
877 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
878 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
879 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
881 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
882 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
886 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
887 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
889 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
890 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
891 and tail -f uses inotify.
893 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
894 which is especially significant on macOS.
897 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
901 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
902 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
904 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
905 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
906 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
907 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
909 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
910 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
912 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
913 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
915 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
916 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
917 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
919 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
920 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
922 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
923 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
924 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
926 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
927 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
928 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
929 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
930 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
934 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
938 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
940 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
941 rather than reading from the start.
943 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
944 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
945 for unknown long options.
949 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
950 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
953 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
957 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
958 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
959 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
960 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
962 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
963 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
964 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
965 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
966 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
968 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
969 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
970 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
971 now fails instead of losing the data.
972 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
974 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
975 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
976 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
978 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
979 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
980 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
982 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
983 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
984 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
986 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
987 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
988 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
990 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
991 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
994 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
995 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
996 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
998 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
999 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1000 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1002 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1003 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1006 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1007 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1009 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1010 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1013 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1014 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1016 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1017 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1018 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1019 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1021 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1022 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1023 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1025 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1026 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1027 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1029 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1030 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1034 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1035 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1036 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1038 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1039 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1041 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1042 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1044 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1045 executing the subsidiary program.
1047 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1049 ** Changes in behavior
1051 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1052 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1053 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1054 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1058 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1060 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1061 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1063 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1064 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1065 is effective in this case.
1068 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1072 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1073 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
1074 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1076 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1077 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1078 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1080 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1081 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1082 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1084 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1085 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1086 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1088 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1089 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1090 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1092 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1093 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1094 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1095 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1096 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1098 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1099 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1100 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1101 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1105 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1106 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1107 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1108 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1110 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1111 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1112 time zone is indeterminate.
1114 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1115 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1116 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1117 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1119 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1120 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1121 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1123 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1124 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1126 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1127 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1128 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1132 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1133 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1134 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1137 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1141 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1142 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1145 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1146 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1147 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1149 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1150 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1151 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1152 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1153 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1155 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1156 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1157 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1159 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1160 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1162 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1163 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1164 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1166 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1167 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1168 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1170 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1171 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1173 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1174 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1175 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1177 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1178 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1180 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1181 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1182 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1184 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1186 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1187 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1189 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1190 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1192 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1193 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1195 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1198 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1199 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1200 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1201 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1203 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1204 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1205 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1207 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1208 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1209 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1211 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1212 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1213 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1215 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1216 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1217 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1219 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1222 ** Changes in behavior
1224 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1226 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1227 values for any argument.
1229 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1230 they are out of localtime range.
1232 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1233 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1234 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1235 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1239 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1240 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1241 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1243 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1244 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1246 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1247 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1249 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1251 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1252 written to a terminal.
1254 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1255 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1257 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1258 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1259 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1260 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1261 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1262 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1263 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1264 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1265 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1266 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1267 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1269 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1270 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1274 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1275 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1279 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1281 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1282 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1284 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1287 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1291 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1292 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1293 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1294 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1296 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1297 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1299 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1300 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1301 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1303 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1304 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1306 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1307 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1308 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1310 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1311 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1313 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1314 that specify an offset for the first field.
1315 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1317 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1318 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1322 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1323 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1327 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1328 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1330 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1331 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1332 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1333 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1334 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1336 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1337 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1338 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1340 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1341 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1342 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1344 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1345 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1347 ** Changes in behavior
1349 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1350 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1352 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1353 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1355 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1356 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1358 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1359 when outputting to a terminal.
1361 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1365 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1366 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1368 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1369 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1371 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1372 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1373 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1375 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1376 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1378 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1379 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1380 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1382 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1384 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1385 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1386 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1388 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1389 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1392 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1396 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1397 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1399 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1400 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1402 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1403 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1404 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1406 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1407 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1408 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1409 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1411 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1412 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1413 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1414 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1416 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1417 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1419 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1420 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1422 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1423 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1424 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1426 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1427 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1428 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1430 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1431 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1432 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1434 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1435 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1436 character at the 4GiB position.
1437 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1439 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1440 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1442 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1443 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1445 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1446 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1447 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1449 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1450 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1452 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1453 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1454 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1456 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1457 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1459 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1460 when those files are being created or renamed.
1461 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1465 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1466 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1467 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1468 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1470 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1471 on stderr approximately every second.
1473 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1474 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1476 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1477 other than the default newline character.
1479 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1480 a useful setting with high latency links.
1482 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1483 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1485 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1486 and output errors in general.
1488 ** Changes in behavior
1490 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1491 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1492 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1493 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1495 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1496 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1497 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1498 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1499 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1501 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1502 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1504 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1506 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1507 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1509 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1510 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1514 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1515 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1517 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1518 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1520 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1521 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1523 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1524 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1526 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1528 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1529 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1530 documentation are provided.
1533 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1537 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1538 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1540 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1541 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1542 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1543 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1545 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1546 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1547 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1548 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1550 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1551 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1553 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1554 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1556 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1557 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1558 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1559 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1560 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1561 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1562 values are in octal.
1575 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1577 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1578 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1579 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1580 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1581 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1582 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1584 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1585 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1586 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1589 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1590 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1591 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1593 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1594 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1595 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1596 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1598 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1599 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1600 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1602 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1603 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1604 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1606 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1607 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1608 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1609 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1610 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1612 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1613 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1614 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1616 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1617 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1619 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1620 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1621 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1623 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1624 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1626 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1627 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1629 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1630 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1632 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1633 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1635 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1636 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1637 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1639 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1640 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1644 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1645 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1647 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1648 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1649 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1650 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1651 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1652 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1653 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1654 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1655 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1656 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1657 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1658 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1659 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1660 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1661 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1662 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1663 it suitable for embedded system.
1665 ** Changes in behavior
1667 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1668 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1670 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1671 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1673 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1674 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1675 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1677 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1678 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1679 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1683 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1684 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1685 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1687 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1689 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1690 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1691 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1693 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1694 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1695 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1696 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1698 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1699 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1701 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1702 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1703 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1706 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1710 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1711 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1712 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1714 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1715 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1716 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1717 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1719 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1720 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1721 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1723 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1724 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1726 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1728 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1729 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1730 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1732 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1733 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1734 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1736 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1737 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1738 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1739 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1741 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1742 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1743 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1745 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1746 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1747 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1749 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1750 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1752 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1753 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1754 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1755 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1757 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1758 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1759 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1761 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1762 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1763 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1767 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1768 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1769 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1771 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1772 used to identify the split points.
1774 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1775 command line argument through to the output.
1777 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1780 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1781 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1783 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1784 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1786 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1788 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1789 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1790 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1792 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1793 unique groups with empty lines.
1795 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1796 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1798 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1801 ** Changes in behavior
1803 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1804 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1805 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1806 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1808 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1809 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1811 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1812 not just the transfer counts.
1814 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1816 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1817 as per the documented interface.
1821 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1823 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1824 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1825 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1826 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1828 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1829 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1830 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1831 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1833 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1834 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1835 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1837 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1838 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1840 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1841 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1843 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1847 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1850 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1854 numfmt: reformat numbers
1858 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1859 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1860 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1862 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1863 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1864 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1866 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1867 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1871 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1872 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1874 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1875 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1876 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1878 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1879 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1880 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1882 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1883 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1884 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1886 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1887 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1888 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1890 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1891 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1892 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1894 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1895 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1897 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1898 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1900 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1901 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1902 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1904 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1905 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1906 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1908 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1909 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1910 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1912 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1913 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1914 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1915 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1917 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1918 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1919 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1921 ** Changes in behavior
1923 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1924 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1925 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1926 'total' in the target column.
1928 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1929 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1930 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1932 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1933 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1935 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1936 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1940 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1941 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1943 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1944 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1946 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1950 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1951 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1952 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1953 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1954 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1955 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1956 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1957 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1958 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1959 for a patched distribution package.
1961 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1962 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1964 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1965 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1966 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1967 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1970 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1974 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1976 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1977 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1978 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1982 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1983 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1984 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1985 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1986 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1988 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1989 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1991 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1992 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1993 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1994 eventually exits nonzero.
1996 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1997 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1998 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1999 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2000 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2002 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2003 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2006 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2007 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2008 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2010 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2011 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2012 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2014 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2015 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2016 Before, this would infloop:
2017 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2018 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2020 ** Changes in behavior
2022 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2026 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2027 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2028 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2029 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2030 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2033 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2034 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2035 format-changing options.
2037 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2038 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2039 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2040 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2041 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2045 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2046 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2047 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2048 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2049 are run without following the instructions in README.
2051 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2052 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2053 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2054 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2055 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2056 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2057 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2060 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2064 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2065 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2066 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2067 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2069 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2070 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2071 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2072 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2074 sort -u could read freed memory.
2075 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2076 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2077 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2081 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2082 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2083 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2084 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2087 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2091 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2092 processes will not intersperse their output.
2093 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2095 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2096 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2097 date: invalid date '\260'
2098 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2100 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2101 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2102 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2103 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2105 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2106 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2107 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2109 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2110 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2111 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2112 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2113 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2114 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2116 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2117 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2119 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2120 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2122 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2123 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2124 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2126 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2127 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2128 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2132 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2134 ** Changes in behavior
2136 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2137 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2138 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2139 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2140 have any reason to include it here.
2144 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2145 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2146 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2148 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2149 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2150 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2153 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2157 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2158 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2159 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2160 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2161 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2162 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2164 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2165 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2166 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2167 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2168 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2169 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2170 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2172 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2173 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2175 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2176 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2180 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2181 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2183 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2185 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2187 ** Changes in behavior
2189 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2190 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2191 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2193 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2194 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2197 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2201 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2202 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2203 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2204 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2205 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2206 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2207 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2208 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2210 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2211 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2212 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2213 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2214 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2216 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2217 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2219 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2220 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2222 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2223 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2225 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2226 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2228 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2229 additional static suffix to output file names.
2231 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2232 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2233 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2235 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2236 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2240 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2241 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2242 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2244 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2245 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2246 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2247 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2248 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2249 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2251 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2252 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2253 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2254 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2255 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2257 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2258 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2259 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2260 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2264 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2265 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2266 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2268 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2269 instead of causing a usage failure.
2271 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2274 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2278 realpath: print resolved file names.
2282 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2283 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2285 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2286 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2288 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2289 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2290 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2291 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2292 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2293 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2295 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2296 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2297 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2299 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2300 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2301 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2303 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2304 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2305 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2306 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2307 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2309 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2311 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2312 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2314 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2315 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2316 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2318 ** Changes in behavior
2320 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2321 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2322 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2323 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2324 usually-short referent instead.
2326 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2327 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2328 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2329 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2332 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2336 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2337 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2338 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2340 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2341 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2343 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2344 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2348 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2349 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2351 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2352 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2353 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2354 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2356 ** Changes in behavior
2358 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2359 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2360 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2364 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2365 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2366 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2369 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2373 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2374 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2375 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2377 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2378 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2380 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2381 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2382 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2383 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2384 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2386 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2387 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2388 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2389 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2390 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2391 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2392 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2393 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2395 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2396 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2398 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2399 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2401 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2402 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2404 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2405 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2406 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2408 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2409 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2410 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2411 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2413 ** Changes in behavior
2415 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2416 when -v or -c specified.
2418 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2419 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2423 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2424 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2425 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2426 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2427 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2429 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2430 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2431 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2433 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2434 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2435 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2436 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2437 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2438 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2439 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2441 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2442 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2443 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2447 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2448 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2450 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2453 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2454 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2456 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2457 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2459 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2460 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2462 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2464 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2468 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2469 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2471 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2474 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2478 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2479 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2481 ** Changes in behavior
2483 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2484 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2485 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2486 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2487 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2488 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2489 resolved for 2.6.39.
2490 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2491 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2492 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2496 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2499 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2503 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2504 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2505 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2507 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2508 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2509 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2511 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2512 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2513 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2515 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2516 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2518 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2519 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2521 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2522 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2524 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2525 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2529 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2530 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2531 processed portion thereof.
2533 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2534 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2536 ** Changes in behavior
2538 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2539 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2540 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2542 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2543 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2544 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2546 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2547 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2549 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2550 Use --preserve-context instead.
2552 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2555 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2559 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2560 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2561 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2562 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2563 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2565 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2566 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2568 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2569 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2570 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2572 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2573 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2575 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2576 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2580 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2581 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2582 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2583 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2584 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2585 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2586 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2587 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2589 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2590 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2591 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2593 ** Changes in behavior
2595 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2596 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2597 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2600 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2604 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2605 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2606 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2609 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2613 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2614 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2616 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2617 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2619 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2620 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2622 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2623 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2624 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2625 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2627 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2628 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2630 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2631 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2632 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2634 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2636 ** Changes in behavior
2638 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2639 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2640 to the number of available processors.
2644 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2645 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2646 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2649 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2653 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2654 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2655 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2656 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2658 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2659 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2660 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2662 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2663 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2665 ** Changes in behavior
2667 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2668 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2670 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2671 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2672 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2673 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2674 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2675 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2677 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2678 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2679 the same way as the others.
2681 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2682 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2685 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2689 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2690 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2691 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2693 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2694 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2696 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2697 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2698 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2700 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2701 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2703 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2704 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2706 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2707 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2708 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2710 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2711 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2712 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2713 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2717 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2718 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2720 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2723 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2724 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2726 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2728 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2729 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2730 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2732 ** Changes in behavior
2734 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2735 rather than its aliased target.
2737 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2738 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2739 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2741 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2742 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2743 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2744 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2745 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2746 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2747 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2748 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2750 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2752 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2754 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2755 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2758 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2759 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2760 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2761 control like taskset for example.
2763 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2765 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2766 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2767 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2768 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2769 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2770 includes %C when context information is available.
2772 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2773 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2774 rather than a file system attribute.
2776 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2777 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2778 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2779 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2781 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2782 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2783 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2785 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2786 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2787 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2790 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2794 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2795 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2797 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2799 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2800 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2802 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2803 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2804 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2805 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2807 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2808 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2809 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2813 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2814 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2816 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2817 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2818 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2820 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2821 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2822 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2823 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2824 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2825 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2826 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2827 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2828 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2830 ** Changes in behavior
2832 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2833 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2835 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2836 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2839 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2843 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2844 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2845 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2846 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2850 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2851 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2853 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2854 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2855 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2856 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2858 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2859 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2860 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2863 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2867 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2868 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2869 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2871 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2872 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2873 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2875 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2876 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2878 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2879 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2880 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2881 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2883 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2884 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2885 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2887 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2888 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2889 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2890 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2892 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2893 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2894 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2896 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2897 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2898 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2899 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2901 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2902 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2903 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2905 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2906 processes will not intersperse their output.
2907 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2910 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2914 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2915 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2917 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2918 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2920 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2921 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2922 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2923 the presence of the empty string argument.
2924 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2926 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2927 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2928 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2929 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2931 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2932 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2934 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2935 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2936 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2938 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2939 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2940 and with a malicious user on the same system
2941 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2942 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2945 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2949 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2950 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2951 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2953 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2954 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2955 offending directory and all "contents."
2957 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2958 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2959 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2961 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2962 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2963 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2965 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2966 processes will not intersperse their output.
2967 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2968 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2970 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2971 output the name of the file to stdout.
2972 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2974 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2975 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2976 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2978 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2979 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2982 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2983 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2984 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2986 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2987 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2988 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2989 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2990 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2991 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2993 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2994 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2995 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2996 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2998 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2999 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3001 ** Changes in behavior
3003 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3004 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3005 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3006 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3007 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3009 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3010 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3011 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3012 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3014 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3016 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3017 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3018 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3019 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3020 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3024 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3028 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3029 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3031 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3032 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3034 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3035 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3036 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3038 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3039 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3042 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3046 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3047 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3048 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3050 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3051 to accommodate leap seconds.
3052 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3054 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3055 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3056 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3058 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3060 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3061 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3062 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3064 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3065 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3066 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3067 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3068 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3072 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3073 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3074 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3075 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3077 ** Changes in behavior
3079 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3080 environment variable is set.
3082 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3083 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3084 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3088 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3089 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3090 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3091 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3093 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3094 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3095 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3096 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3100 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3101 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3102 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3104 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3105 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3106 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3107 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3108 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3109 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3110 another improvement:
3112 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
3113 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3116 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3120 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3121 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3122 and libraries tested at configure time.
3123 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3125 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3126 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3128 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3129 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3131 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3132 printing a summary to stderr.
3133 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3135 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3136 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3137 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3139 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3140 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3142 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3143 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3144 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3145 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3147 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3148 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3149 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3150 which is relatively unusual.
3151 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3153 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3154 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3155 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3156 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3157 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3158 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3159 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3163 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3164 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3165 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3166 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3167 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3171 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3172 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3174 ** Changes in behavior
3176 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3177 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3178 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3179 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3180 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3183 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3187 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3188 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3190 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3191 before data copying has started.
3193 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3194 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3196 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3197 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3198 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3199 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3201 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3202 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3203 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3204 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3206 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3211 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3212 for its standard streams.
3214 ** Changes in behavior
3216 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3217 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3218 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3219 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3220 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3221 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3223 ** Deprecated options
3225 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3226 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3230 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3232 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3233 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3234 a btrfs file system.
3236 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3238 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3239 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3241 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3242 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3245 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3249 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3250 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3251 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3252 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3254 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3255 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3256 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3257 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3258 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3263 make check: two tests have been corrected
3267 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3268 inherited from gnulib.
3271 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3275 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3276 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3277 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3278 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3280 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3281 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3283 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3285 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3286 systems without xattr support.
3288 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3289 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3290 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3292 ** Changes in behavior
3294 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3295 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3296 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3297 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3299 ** Improved robustness
3301 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3302 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3303 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3304 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3305 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3306 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3307 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3308 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3309 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3313 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3314 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3316 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3317 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3318 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3319 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3320 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3323 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3327 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3328 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3329 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3333 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3334 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3335 data was read, or on process exit.
3336 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3338 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3339 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3340 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3341 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3343 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3344 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3345 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3346 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3348 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3349 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3351 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3352 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3354 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3355 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3356 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3358 ** Changes in behavior
3360 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3361 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3362 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3364 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3365 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3367 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3368 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3369 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3372 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3376 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3378 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3379 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3380 install: Never copies xattrs
3382 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3383 from overwriting any existing destination file
3385 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3386 mode where this feature is available.
3388 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3389 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3390 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3391 do not modify the destination at all.
3393 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3395 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3399 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3400 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3402 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3404 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3405 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3407 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3408 processing the first file name
3410 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3411 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3412 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3413 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3415 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3416 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3418 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3419 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3422 ** Changes in behavior
3424 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3425 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3427 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3428 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3429 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3431 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3432 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3434 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3436 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3437 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3438 is still marked with a '+'.
3441 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3445 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3446 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3450 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3451 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3452 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3453 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3454 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3455 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3457 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3458 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3460 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3461 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3463 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3465 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3466 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3467 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3469 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3470 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3472 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3473 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3474 used to factor large numbers.
3476 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3479 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3481 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3483 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3484 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3486 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3487 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3488 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3489 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3491 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3492 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3493 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3495 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3496 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3500 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3502 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3503 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3505 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3506 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3508 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3510 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3511 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3515 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3516 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3517 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3519 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3521 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3522 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3523 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3525 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3526 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3527 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3529 ** Changes in behavior
3531 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3532 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3535 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3539 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3540 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3541 'futimens' system calls.
3545 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3547 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3548 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3549 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3551 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3552 with no USERNAME argument.
3554 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3555 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3556 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3558 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3559 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3560 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3561 number of fields for some inputs.
3563 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3564 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3566 ** Changes in behavior
3568 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3569 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3572 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3576 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3578 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3579 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3580 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3581 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3583 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3584 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3586 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3587 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3589 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3590 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3592 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3593 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3594 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3595 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3597 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3598 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3599 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3600 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3601 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3602 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3604 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3605 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3607 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3608 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3609 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3611 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3612 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3614 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3615 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3617 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3618 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3619 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3620 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3622 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3623 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3625 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3626 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3628 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3629 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3630 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3634 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3635 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3637 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3638 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3639 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3640 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3644 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3645 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3647 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3649 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3653 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3654 which have negative errno values.
3658 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3662 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3666 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3667 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3670 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3674 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3675 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3676 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3678 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3679 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3680 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3681 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3685 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3686 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3687 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3688 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3691 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3695 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3697 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3698 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3699 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3702 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3706 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3707 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3709 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3711 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3713 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3715 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3719 ** Changes in behavior
3721 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3722 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3724 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3725 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3727 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3728 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3729 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3733 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3734 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3735 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3736 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3737 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3738 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3739 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3740 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3741 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3742 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3743 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3745 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3746 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3747 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3750 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3753 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3754 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3755 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3757 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3758 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3759 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3762 ** New build options
3764 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3765 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3766 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3767 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3769 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3770 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3771 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3772 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3773 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3774 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3775 of "make check" fail.
3777 ** Remove deprecated options
3779 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3780 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3781 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3782 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3783 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3785 ** Improved robustness
3787 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3788 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3789 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3790 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3791 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3792 loss of the contents of a/f.
3794 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3795 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3799 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3800 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3801 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3803 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3804 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3805 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3806 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3808 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3809 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3810 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3811 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3812 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3813 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3814 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3815 destination is a symlink.
3817 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3819 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3820 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3822 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3823 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3825 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3827 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3828 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3830 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3831 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3833 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3836 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3837 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3839 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3840 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3842 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3843 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3844 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3845 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3847 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3848 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3849 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3851 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3852 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3853 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3855 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3856 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3857 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3858 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3860 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3861 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3862 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3864 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3865 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3867 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3868 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3870 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3872 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3873 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3874 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3876 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3877 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3879 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3880 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3882 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3883 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3885 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3886 [present in the original version]
3889 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3893 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3895 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3896 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3897 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3899 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3900 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3902 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3906 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3907 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3909 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3910 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3912 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3913 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3915 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3916 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3917 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3918 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3919 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3920 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3922 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3923 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3926 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3927 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3929 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3932 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3933 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3934 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3936 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3937 directory is unreadable.
3939 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3940 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3941 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3943 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3944 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3945 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3946 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3947 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3950 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3951 Before it would print nothing.
3953 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3955 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3956 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3957 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3958 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3959 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3960 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3961 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3962 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3964 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3968 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3969 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3970 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3972 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3973 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3974 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3975 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3978 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3982 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3983 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3984 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3985 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3986 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3987 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3988 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3990 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3991 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3992 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3993 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3994 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3995 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3996 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3997 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3999 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4000 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4001 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4004 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4008 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4009 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4011 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4012 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4013 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4015 ** Improved robustness
4017 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4018 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4019 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4022 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4026 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4027 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4028 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4029 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4030 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4032 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4036 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4039 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4043 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4044 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4045 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4046 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4048 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4049 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4051 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4052 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4053 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4056 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4058 ** Improved robustness
4060 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4061 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4063 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4064 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4065 or NFS-mounted partition.
4067 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4068 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4072 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4073 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4074 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4075 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4076 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4077 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4079 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4080 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4082 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4083 or neglect to report file removal.
4085 For the "groups" command:
4087 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4088 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4090 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4092 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4094 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4098 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4099 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4102 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4104 ** Changes in behavior
4106 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4107 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4108 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4109 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4111 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4112 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4113 a final './' or '../' component.
4115 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4116 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4117 this only for pipes.
4119 ** Infrastructure changes
4121 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4122 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4123 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4124 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4128 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4129 name is "." or "..".
4131 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4132 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4133 dirent.d_type support.
4135 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4136 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4138 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4139 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4140 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4141 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4144 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4146 ** Changes in behavior
4148 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4152 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4153 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4157 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4158 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4159 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4161 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4162 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4164 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4165 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4167 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4169 ** Improved robustness
4171 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4172 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4173 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4175 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4176 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4179 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4180 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4182 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4183 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4185 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4186 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4188 ** Changes in behavior
4190 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4191 where the two are distinct.
4193 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4194 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4195 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4196 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4197 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4198 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4199 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4200 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4201 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4202 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4203 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4204 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4205 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4206 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4207 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4208 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4209 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4211 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4212 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4213 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4215 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4216 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4217 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4218 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4221 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4222 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4226 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4227 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4228 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4229 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4231 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4232 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4233 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4235 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4236 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4237 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4238 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4239 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4242 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4243 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4245 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4246 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4247 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4248 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4250 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4251 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4252 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4254 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4255 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4256 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4257 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4259 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4260 and sticky) with the -m option.
4262 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4263 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4264 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4265 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4266 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4268 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4269 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4271 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4275 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4276 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4277 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4278 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4280 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4282 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4284 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4285 silently ignoring one of them.
4287 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4288 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4289 containing this change was 5.92.
4291 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4292 automatically newline terminated.
4294 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4295 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4296 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4297 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4300 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4301 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4302 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4305 ** Scheduled for removal
4307 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4308 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4310 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4311 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4312 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4313 command to unlink a directory.
4315 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4316 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4317 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4318 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4322 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4323 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4324 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4325 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4326 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4327 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4331 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4332 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4334 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4336 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4337 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4338 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4340 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4341 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4344 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4345 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4347 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4348 list directories before files.
4350 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4351 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4352 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4353 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4356 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4358 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4360 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4361 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4362 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4364 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4365 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4369 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4370 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4371 usually printing nothing.
4373 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4375 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4376 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4377 them with hard-linked directories.
4379 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4380 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4381 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4383 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4384 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4385 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4387 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4390 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4391 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4393 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4394 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4396 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4397 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4399 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4400 all command-line arguments.
4402 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4404 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4406 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4407 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4409 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4411 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4412 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4413 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4414 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4415 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4417 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4418 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4420 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4421 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4422 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4423 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4425 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4427 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4431 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4432 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4434 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4435 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4437 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4438 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4440 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4441 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4443 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4444 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4446 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4448 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4449 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4450 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4453 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4455 ** Build-related bug fixes
4457 installing .mo files would fail
4460 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4464 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4466 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4469 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4473 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4474 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4478 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4480 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4481 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4483 ** Deprecated options
4485 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4486 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4488 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4492 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4494 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4495 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4496 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4497 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4499 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4502 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4508 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4513 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4515 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4517 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4518 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4519 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4521 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4522 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4523 problematic usages. These include:
4525 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4526 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4527 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4528 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4529 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4530 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4531 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4532 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4533 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4535 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4536 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4538 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4539 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4540 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4541 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4543 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4544 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4545 between binary and text files.
4547 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4551 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4555 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4556 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4558 head tac tail tee tr
4559 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4561 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4562 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4564 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4565 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4566 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4568 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4570 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4572 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4573 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4574 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4578 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4580 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4581 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4583 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4584 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4585 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4589 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4590 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4594 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4595 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4596 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4600 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4601 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4605 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4607 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4609 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4613 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4614 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4615 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4617 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4618 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4619 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4620 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4621 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4623 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4627 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4628 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4629 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4631 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4633 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4634 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4635 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4636 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4638 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4640 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4641 rather than silently wrapping around.
4643 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4644 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4646 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4647 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4649 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4650 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4651 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4652 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4654 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4656 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4658 ** Improved robustness
4660 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4661 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4662 no matter how large the result.
4664 ** Improved portability
4666 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4667 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4669 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4671 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4672 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4673 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4675 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4676 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4680 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4681 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4683 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4685 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4686 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4687 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4688 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4690 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4691 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4693 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4694 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4695 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4697 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4699 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4700 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4702 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4703 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4705 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4707 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4708 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4710 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4711 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4713 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4714 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4715 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4717 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4719 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4721 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4725 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4727 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4728 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4729 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4731 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4732 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4734 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4735 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4736 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4738 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4739 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4741 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4742 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4743 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4744 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4746 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4747 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4749 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4750 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4751 the file system does not support it.
4753 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4755 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4756 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4758 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4760 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4761 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4763 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4764 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4765 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4766 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4768 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4769 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4772 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4773 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4774 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4775 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4777 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4778 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4779 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4780 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4782 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4783 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4785 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4787 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4788 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4789 reporting incorrect results.
4793 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4794 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4796 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4799 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4801 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4802 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4804 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4805 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4807 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4810 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4811 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4812 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4813 the file name does not look like a page range.
4815 printf has several changes:
4817 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4818 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4820 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4821 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4822 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4824 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4825 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4828 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4829 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4831 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4832 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4834 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4836 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4837 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4839 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4841 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4843 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4844 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4845 when first encountering the directory.
4849 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4850 output; POSIX requires this.
4852 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4853 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4855 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4857 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4858 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4860 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4861 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4863 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4864 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4865 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4866 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4867 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4868 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4869 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4871 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4872 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4873 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4875 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4876 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4878 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4880 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4882 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4883 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4884 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4885 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4887 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4891 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4892 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4893 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4894 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4895 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4897 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4898 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4899 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4901 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4902 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4904 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4905 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4907 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4908 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4909 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4910 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4911 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4913 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4914 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4916 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4917 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4919 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4921 nocreat do not create the output file
4922 excl fail if the output file already exists
4923 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4924 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4926 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4928 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4929 direct use direct I/O for data
4930 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4931 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4932 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4933 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4934 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4936 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4938 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4939 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4942 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4943 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4944 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4945 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4946 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4947 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4949 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4950 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4952 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4955 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4957 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4959 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4960 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4962 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4963 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4964 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4966 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4967 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4968 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4970 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4972 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4973 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4975 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4976 for compatibility with bash.
4978 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4980 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4981 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4982 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4983 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4985 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4986 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4988 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4989 ls supports TABSIZE.
4990 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4991 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4992 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4994 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4997 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4999 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5000 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5001 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5002 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5003 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5004 an offset, not as a file name.
5006 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5007 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5009 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5010 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5012 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5013 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5015 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5016 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5017 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5019 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5020 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5022 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5023 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5027 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5029 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5031 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5035 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5036 or more arguments between partitions.
5038 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5039 holes in the destination.
5041 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5042 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5043 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5044 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5045 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5046 terminates immediately.
5048 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5050 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5052 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5053 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5054 not the empty string.
5056 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5057 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5061 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5062 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5063 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5066 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5073 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5077 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5078 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5080 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5081 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5083 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5084 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5085 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5088 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5092 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5093 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5095 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5096 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5098 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5099 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5100 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5102 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5104 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5107 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5109 ** Configuration option
5111 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5112 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5116 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5117 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5121 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5122 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5123 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5126 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5127 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5128 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5129 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5130 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5131 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5132 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5135 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5139 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5140 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5141 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5143 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5144 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5146 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5148 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5149 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5150 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5151 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5153 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5155 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5156 not just the ones that reference directories
5158 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5159 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5161 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5162 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5163 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5165 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5166 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5167 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5168 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5169 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5170 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5172 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5177 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5178 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5180 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5182 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5184 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5186 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5187 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5189 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5190 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5192 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5194 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5198 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5200 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5202 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5203 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5204 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5205 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5206 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5208 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5209 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5211 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5212 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5214 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5215 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5217 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5218 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5219 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5223 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5224 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5225 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5226 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5227 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5228 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5229 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5230 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5231 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5232 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5233 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5234 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5235 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5236 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5238 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5240 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5241 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5243 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5245 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5247 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5248 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5250 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5252 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5253 without a trailing newline.
5255 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5256 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5258 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5261 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5265 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5267 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5269 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5270 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5271 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5272 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5274 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5276 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5277 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5278 be printed without leading spaces.
5280 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5281 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5286 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5287 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5288 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5290 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5292 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5293 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5295 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5296 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5298 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5299 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5301 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5303 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5305 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5307 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5308 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5310 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5312 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5314 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5315 byte offsets are specified.
5318 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5321 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5324 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5325 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5326 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5327 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5328 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5329 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5330 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5331 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5332 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5333 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5334 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5335 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5336 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5337 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5338 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5339 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5340 directory where M has write access.
5341 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5342 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5343 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5346 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5347 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5348 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5349 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5350 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5351 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5352 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5353 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5354 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5355 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5356 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5357 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5358 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5359 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5360 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5361 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5362 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5363 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5364 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5365 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5366 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5367 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5368 appeared one additional time.
5370 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5371 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5372 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5373 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5376 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5377 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5378 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5379 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5380 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5381 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5382 if there were more than 338.
5384 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5385 - false --help now exits nonzero
5388 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5389 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5390 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5391 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5394 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5395 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5396 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5397 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5398 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5401 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5402 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5403 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5404 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5405 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5406 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5407 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5410 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5411 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5412 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5413 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5414 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5415 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5417 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5418 under certain unusual conditions
5419 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5420 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5423 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5424 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5425 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5426 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5427 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5428 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5429 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5430 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5431 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5432 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5433 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5434 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5435 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5436 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5437 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5438 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5441 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5442 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5445 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5446 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5447 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5448 involving hard-linked directories
5449 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5450 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5451 character-special and block files
5454 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5455 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5456 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5457 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5458 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5459 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5460 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5461 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5462 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5464 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5465 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5466 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5467 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5468 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5469 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5470 specified on the command line.
5471 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5472 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5473 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5474 the first file untouched.
5475 * readlink: new program
5476 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5477 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5478 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5479 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5480 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5481 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5484 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5485 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5486 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5487 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5488 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5489 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5490 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5491 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5492 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5493 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5494 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5495 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5497 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5498 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5499 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5501 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5502 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5503 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5504 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5505 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5506 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5507 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5508 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5511 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5512 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5515 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5516 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5517 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5518 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5519 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5520 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5521 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5524 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5525 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5527 ========================================================================
5528 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5529 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5532 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5534 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5535 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5536 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5537 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5538 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5539 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5540 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5541 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5542 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5543 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5544 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5545 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5547 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5548 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5549 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5550 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5552 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5555 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5557 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5558 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5559 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5560 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5561 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5562 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5563 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5566 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5567 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5568 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5569 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5570 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5571 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5572 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5573 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5574 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5575 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5576 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5577 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5578 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5579 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5580 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5581 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5583 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5584 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5586 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5587 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5588 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5589 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5590 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5591 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5593 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5594 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5595 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5596 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5597 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5598 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5599 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5601 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5602 the source files in the following example:
5603 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5604 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5605 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5606 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5607 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5608 links between source files with --preserve=links
5609 * cp accepts new options:
5610 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5611 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5612 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5613 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5614 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5615 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5616 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5617 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5618 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5620 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5621 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5622 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5623 even though it's older than dest.
5624 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5625 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5626 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5627 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5628 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5630 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5631 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5632 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5633 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5634 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5635 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5636 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5638 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5639 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5640 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5642 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5643 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5644 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5645 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5646 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5647 This is the default.
5649 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5650 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5651 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5652 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5653 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5655 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5658 ========================================================================
5659 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5660 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5663 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5664 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5666 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5667 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5668 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5669 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5670 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5672 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5673 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5674 that specifies a non-directory
5677 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5678 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5679 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5680 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5681 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5682 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5683 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5684 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5685 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5686 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5687 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5688 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5689 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5690 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5691 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5692 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5693 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5694 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5695 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5696 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5697 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5698 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5699 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5700 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5702 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5703 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5704 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5706 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5708 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5709 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5711 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5712 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5713 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5714 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5715 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5717 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5718 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5719 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5720 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5721 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5723 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5725 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5726 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5727 * still more portability fixes
5728 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5729 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5731 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5733 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5735 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5737 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5738 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5739 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5740 there is any time remaining
5741 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5743 ========================================================================
5744 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5745 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5747 This package began as the union of the following:
5748 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5750 ========================================================================
5752 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5754 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5755 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5756 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5757 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5758 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5759 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.