1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
6 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
10 numfmt: reformat numbers
14 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
15 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
16 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
18 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
19 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
20 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
24 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
27 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
28 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
31 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
32 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
33 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
35 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
36 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
37 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
39 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
40 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
41 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
43 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
44 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
45 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
47 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
48 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
50 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
51 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
53 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
54 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
55 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
57 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
58 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
59 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
61 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
62 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
63 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
65 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
66 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
67 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
68 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
70 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
71 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
72 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
74 ** Changes in behavior
76 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
77 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
78 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
79 'total' in the target column.
81 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
82 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
83 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
85 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
86 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
90 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
91 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
93 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
94 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
96 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
100 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
101 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
102 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
103 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
104 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
105 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
106 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
107 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
108 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
109 for a patched distribution package.
111 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
112 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
114 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
115 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
116 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
117 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
120 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
124 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
126 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
127 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
128 sha384sum and sha512sum.
132 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
133 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
134 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
135 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
136 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
138 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
139 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
141 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
142 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
143 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
144 eventually exits nonzero.
146 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
147 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
148 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
149 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
152 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
153 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
154 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
156 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
157 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
158 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
160 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
161 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
162 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
164 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
165 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
166 Before, this would infloop:
167 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
168 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
170 ** Changes in behavior
172 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
176 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
177 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
178 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
179 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
180 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
183 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
184 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
185 format-changing options.
187 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
188 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
189 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
190 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
191 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
195 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
196 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
197 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
198 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
199 are run without following the instructions in README.
201 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
202 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
203 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
204 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
205 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
206 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
207 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
210 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
214 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
215 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
216 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
217 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
219 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
220 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
221 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
222 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
224 sort -u could read freed memory.
225 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
226 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
227 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
231 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
232 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
233 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
234 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
237 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
241 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
242 processes will not intersperse their output.
243 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
245 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
246 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
247 date: invalid date '\260'
248 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
250 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
251 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
252 lines output by df, can work reliably.
253 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
255 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
256 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
257 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
259 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
260 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
261 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
262 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
263 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
264 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
266 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
269 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
270 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
272 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
273 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
274 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
276 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
277 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
278 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
282 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
284 ** Changes in behavior
286 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
287 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
288 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
289 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
290 have any reason to include it here.
294 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
295 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
296 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
298 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
299 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
300 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
303 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
307 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
308 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
309 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
310 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
311 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
312 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
314 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
315 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
316 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
317 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
318 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
319 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
320 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
322 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
325 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
326 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
330 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
331 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
333 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
335 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
337 ** Changes in behavior
339 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
340 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
341 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
343 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
344 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
347 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
351 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
352 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
353 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
354 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
355 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
356 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
357 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
358 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
360 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
361 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
362 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
363 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
364 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
366 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
367 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
369 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
370 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
372 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
373 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
375 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
376 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
378 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
379 additional static suffix to output file names.
381 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
382 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
383 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
385 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
386 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
390 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
391 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
394 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
395 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
396 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
397 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
398 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
399 typically still point to one of the hard links.
401 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
402 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
403 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
404 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
405 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
407 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
408 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
409 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
410 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
414 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
415 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
416 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
418 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
419 instead of causing a usage failure.
421 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
424 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
428 realpath: print resolved file names.
432 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
433 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
435 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
436 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
438 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
439 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
440 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
441 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
442 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
443 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
445 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
446 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
447 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
449 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
450 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
451 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
453 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
454 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
455 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
456 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
457 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
459 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
461 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
462 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
464 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
465 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
466 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
468 ** Changes in behavior
470 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
471 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
472 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
473 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
474 usually-short referent instead.
476 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
477 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
478 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
479 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
482 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
486 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
487 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
488 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
490 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
491 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
493 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
494 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
498 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
499 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
501 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
502 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
503 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
504 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
506 ** Changes in behavior
508 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
509 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
510 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
514 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
515 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
516 only .tar.xz files is enough.
519 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
523 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
524 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
525 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
527 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
528 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
530 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
531 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
532 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
533 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
534 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
536 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
537 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
538 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
539 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
540 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
541 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
542 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
543 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
545 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
546 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
548 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
549 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
551 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
554 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
555 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
556 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
558 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
559 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
560 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
563 ** Changes in behavior
565 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
566 when -v or -c specified.
568 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
569 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
573 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
574 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
575 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
576 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
577 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
579 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
580 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
581 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
583 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
584 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
585 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
586 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
587 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
588 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
589 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
591 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
592 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
593 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
597 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
598 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
600 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
603 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
604 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
606 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
607 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
609 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
610 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
612 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
614 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
618 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
619 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
621 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
624 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
628 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
629 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
631 ** Changes in behavior
633 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
634 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
635 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
636 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
637 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
638 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
640 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
641 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
642 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
646 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
649 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
653 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
654 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
655 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
657 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
658 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
659 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
661 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
662 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
663 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
665 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
666 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
668 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
669 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
671 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
672 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
674 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
675 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
679 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
680 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
681 processed portion thereof.
683 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
684 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
686 ** Changes in behavior
688 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
689 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
690 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
692 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
693 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
694 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
696 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
697 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
699 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
700 Use --preserve-context instead.
702 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
705 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
709 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
710 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
711 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
712 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
713 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
715 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
716 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
718 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
719 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
720 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
722 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
723 reject file names invalid for that file system.
725 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
730 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
731 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
732 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
733 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
734 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
735 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
736 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
737 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
739 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
740 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
741 the same number of fields are output for each line.
743 ** Changes in behavior
745 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
746 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
747 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
750 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
754 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
755 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
759 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
763 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
764 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
766 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
767 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
769 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
770 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
772 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
773 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
774 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
775 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
777 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
778 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
780 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
781 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
782 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
784 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
786 ** Changes in behavior
788 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
789 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
790 to the number of available processors.
794 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
797 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
801 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
802 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
803 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
804 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
806 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
807 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
808 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
810 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
811 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
813 ** Changes in behavior
815 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
816 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
818 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
819 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
820 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
821 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
822 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
823 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
825 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
826 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
827 the same way as the others.
830 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
834 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
835 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
836 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
838 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
839 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
841 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
842 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
843 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
845 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
846 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
848 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
849 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
851 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
852 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
853 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
855 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
856 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
857 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
858 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
862 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
863 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
865 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
868 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
869 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
871 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
873 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
874 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
875 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
877 ** Changes in behavior
879 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
880 rather than its aliased target.
882 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
883 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
884 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
886 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
887 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
888 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
889 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
890 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
891 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
892 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
893 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
895 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
897 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
899 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
900 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
903 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
904 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
905 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
906 control like taskset for example.
908 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
910 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
911 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
912 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
913 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
914 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
915 includes %C when context information is available.
917 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
918 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
919 rather than a file system attribute.
921 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
922 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
923 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
924 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
926 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
927 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
928 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
930 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
931 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
932 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
935 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
939 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
940 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
942 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
944 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
945 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
947 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
948 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
949 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
950 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
952 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
953 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
954 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
958 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
959 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
961 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
962 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
963 duration after the initial signal was sent.
965 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
966 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
967 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
968 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
969 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
970 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
971 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
972 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
973 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
975 ** Changes in behavior
977 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
978 sequence when it would be a no-op.
980 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
981 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
984 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
988 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
989 of available processors, which may not have been the case
990 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
991 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
995 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
996 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
998 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
999 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1000 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1001 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1003 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1004 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1005 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1008 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1012 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1013 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1014 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1016 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1017 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1018 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1020 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1021 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1023 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1024 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1025 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1026 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1028 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1029 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1030 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1032 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1033 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1034 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1037 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1038 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1039 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1041 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1042 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1043 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1046 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1047 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1048 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1050 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1051 processes will not intersperse their output.
1052 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1055 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1059 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1060 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1062 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1063 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1065 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1066 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1067 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1068 the presence of the empty string argument.
1069 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1071 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1072 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1073 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1074 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1076 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1077 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1079 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1080 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1081 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1083 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1084 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1085 and with a malicious user on the same system
1086 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1087 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1090 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1094 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1095 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1098 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1099 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1100 offending directory and all "contents."
1102 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1103 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1104 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1106 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1107 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1108 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1110 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1111 processes will not intersperse their output.
1112 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1113 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1115 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1116 output the name of the file to stdout.
1117 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1119 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1120 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1121 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1123 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1124 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1127 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1128 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1129 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1131 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1132 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1133 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1134 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1135 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1136 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1138 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1139 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1140 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1141 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1143 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1144 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1146 ** Changes in behavior
1148 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1149 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1150 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1151 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1152 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1154 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1155 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1156 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1157 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1159 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1161 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1162 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1163 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1164 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1165 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1169 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1173 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1174 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1176 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1177 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1179 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1180 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1181 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1183 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1184 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1187 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1191 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1192 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1193 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1195 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1196 to accommodate leap seconds.
1197 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1199 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1200 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1201 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1203 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1205 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1206 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1207 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1209 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1210 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1211 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1212 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1213 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1217 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1218 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1219 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1220 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1222 ** Changes in behavior
1224 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1225 environment variable is set.
1227 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1228 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1229 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1233 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1234 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1235 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1236 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1238 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1239 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1240 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1241 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1245 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1246 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1247 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1249 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1250 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1251 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1252 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1253 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1254 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1255 another improvement:
1257 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1258 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1261 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1265 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1266 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1267 and libraries tested at configure time.
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1270 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1271 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1273 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1274 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1276 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1277 printing a summary to stderr.
1278 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1280 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1281 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1282 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1284 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1285 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1287 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1288 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1289 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1290 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1292 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1293 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1294 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1295 which is relatively unusual.
1296 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1298 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1299 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1300 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1301 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1302 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1303 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1304 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1308 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1309 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1310 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1311 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1312 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1316 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1317 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1319 ** Changes in behavior
1321 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1322 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1323 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1324 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1325 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1328 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1332 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1333 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1335 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1336 before data copying has started.
1338 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1339 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1341 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1342 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1343 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1344 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1346 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1347 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1348 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1349 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1351 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1356 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1357 for its standard streams.
1359 ** Changes in behavior
1361 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1362 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1363 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1364 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1365 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1366 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1368 ** Deprecated options
1370 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1371 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1375 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1377 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1378 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1379 a btrfs file system.
1381 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1383 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1384 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1386 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1387 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1390 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1394 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1395 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1396 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1397 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1399 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1400 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1401 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1402 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1403 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1408 make check: two tests have been corrected
1412 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1413 inherited from gnulib.
1416 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1420 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1421 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1422 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1423 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1425 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1426 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1428 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1430 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1431 systems without xattr support.
1433 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1434 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1435 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1437 ** Changes in behavior
1439 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1440 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1441 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1442 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1444 ** Improved robustness
1446 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1447 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1448 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1449 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1450 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1451 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1452 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1453 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1454 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1458 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1459 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1461 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1462 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1463 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1464 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1465 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1468 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1472 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1473 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1474 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1478 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1479 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1480 data was read, or on process exit.
1481 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1483 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1484 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1485 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1486 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1488 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1489 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1490 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1491 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1493 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1494 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1496 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1497 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1499 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1500 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1501 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1503 ** Changes in behavior
1505 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1506 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1507 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1509 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1510 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1512 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1513 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1514 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1517 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1521 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1523 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1524 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1525 install: Never copies xattrs
1527 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1528 from overwriting any existing destination file
1530 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1531 mode where this feature is available.
1533 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1534 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1535 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1536 do not modify the destination at all.
1538 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1540 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1544 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1545 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1547 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1549 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1550 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1552 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1553 processing the first file name
1555 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1556 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1557 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1558 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1560 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1561 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1563 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1564 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1567 ** Changes in behavior
1569 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1570 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1572 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1573 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1574 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1576 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1577 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1579 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1581 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1582 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1583 is still marked with a '+'.
1586 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1590 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1591 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1595 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1596 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1597 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1598 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1599 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1600 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1602 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1603 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1605 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1606 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1608 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1610 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1611 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1612 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1614 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1615 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1617 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1618 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1619 used to factor large numbers.
1621 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1624 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1626 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1628 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1629 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1631 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1632 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1633 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1634 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1636 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1637 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1638 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1640 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1641 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1645 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1647 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1648 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1650 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1651 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1653 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1655 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1656 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1660 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1661 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1662 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1664 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1666 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1667 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1668 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1670 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1671 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1672 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1674 ** Changes in behavior
1676 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1677 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1680 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1684 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1685 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1686 'futimens' system calls.
1690 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1692 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1693 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1694 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1696 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1697 with no USERNAME argument.
1699 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1700 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1701 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1703 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1704 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1705 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1706 number of fields for some inputs.
1708 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1709 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1711 ** Changes in behavior
1713 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1714 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1717 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1721 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1723 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1724 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1725 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1726 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1728 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1729 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1731 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1732 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1734 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1735 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1737 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1738 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1739 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1740 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1742 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1743 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1744 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1745 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1746 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1747 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1749 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1750 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1752 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1753 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1754 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1756 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1757 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1759 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1760 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1762 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1763 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1764 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1765 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1767 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1768 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1770 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1771 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1773 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1774 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1775 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1779 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1780 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1782 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1783 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1784 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1785 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1789 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1790 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1792 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1794 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1798 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1799 which have negative errno values.
1803 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1807 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1811 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1812 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1815 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1819 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1820 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1821 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1823 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1824 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1825 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1826 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1830 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1831 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1832 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1833 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1836 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1840 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1842 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1843 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1844 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1847 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1851 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1852 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1854 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1856 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1858 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1860 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1864 ** Changes in behavior
1866 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1867 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1869 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1870 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1872 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1873 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1874 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1878 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1879 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1880 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1881 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1882 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1883 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1884 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1885 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1886 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1887 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1888 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1890 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1891 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1892 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1895 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1898 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1899 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1900 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1902 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1903 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1904 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1907 ** New build options
1909 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1910 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1911 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1912 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1914 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1915 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1916 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1917 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1918 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1919 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1920 of "make check" fail.
1922 ** Remove deprecated options
1924 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1925 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1926 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1927 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1928 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1930 ** Improved robustness
1932 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1933 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1934 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1935 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1936 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1937 loss of the contents of a/f.
1939 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1940 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1944 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1945 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1946 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1948 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1949 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1950 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1951 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1953 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1954 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1955 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1956 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1957 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1958 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1959 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1960 destination is a symlink.
1962 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1964 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1965 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1967 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1968 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1970 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1972 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1973 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1975 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1976 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1978 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1981 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1982 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1984 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1985 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1987 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1988 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1989 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1990 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1992 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1993 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1994 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1996 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1997 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1998 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2000 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2001 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2002 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2003 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2005 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2006 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2007 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2009 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2010 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2012 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2013 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2015 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2017 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2018 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2019 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2021 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2022 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2024 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2025 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2027 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2028 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2030 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2031 [present in the original version]
2034 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2038 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2040 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2041 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2042 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2044 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2045 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2047 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2051 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2052 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2054 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2055 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2057 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2058 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2060 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2061 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2062 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2063 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2064 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2065 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2067 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2068 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2071 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2072 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2074 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2077 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2078 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2079 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2081 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2082 directory is unreadable.
2084 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2085 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2086 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2088 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2089 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2090 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2091 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2092 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2095 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2096 Before it would print nothing.
2098 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2100 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2101 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2102 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2103 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2104 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2105 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2106 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2107 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2109 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2113 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2114 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2115 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2117 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2118 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2119 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2120 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2123 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2127 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2128 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2129 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2130 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2131 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2132 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2133 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2135 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2136 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2137 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2138 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2139 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2140 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2141 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2142 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2144 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2145 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2146 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2149 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2153 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2154 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2156 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2157 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2158 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2160 ** Improved robustness
2162 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2163 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2164 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2167 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2171 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2172 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2173 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2174 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2175 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2177 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2181 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2184 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2188 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2189 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2190 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2191 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2193 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2194 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2196 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2197 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2198 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2201 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2203 ** Improved robustness
2205 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2206 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2208 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2209 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2210 or NFS-mounted partition.
2212 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2213 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2217 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2218 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2219 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2220 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2221 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2222 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2224 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2225 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2227 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2228 or neglect to report file removal.
2230 For the "groups" command:
2232 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2233 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2235 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2237 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2239 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2243 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2244 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2247 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2249 ** Changes in behavior
2251 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2252 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2253 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2254 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2256 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2257 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2258 a final './' or '../' component.
2260 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2261 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2262 this only for pipes.
2264 ** Infrastructure changes
2266 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2267 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2268 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2269 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2273 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2274 name is "." or "..".
2276 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2277 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2278 dirent.d_type support.
2280 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2281 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2283 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2284 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2285 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2286 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2289 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2291 ** Changes in behavior
2293 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2297 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2298 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2302 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2303 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2304 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2306 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2307 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2309 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2310 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2312 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2314 ** Improved robustness
2316 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2317 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2318 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2320 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2321 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2324 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2325 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2327 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2328 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2330 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2331 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2333 ** Changes in behavior
2335 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2336 where the two are distinct.
2338 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2339 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2340 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2341 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2342 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2343 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2344 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2345 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2346 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2347 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2348 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2349 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2350 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2351 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2352 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2353 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2354 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2356 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2357 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2358 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2360 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2361 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2362 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2363 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2366 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2367 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2371 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2372 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2373 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2374 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2376 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2377 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2378 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2380 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2381 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2382 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2383 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2384 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2387 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2388 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2390 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2391 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2392 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2393 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2395 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2396 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2397 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2399 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2400 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2401 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2402 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2404 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2405 and sticky) with the -m option.
2407 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2408 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2409 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2410 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2411 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2413 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2414 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2416 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2420 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2421 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2422 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2423 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2425 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2427 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2429 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2430 silently ignoring one of them.
2432 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2433 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2434 containing this change was 5.92.
2436 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2437 automatically newline terminated.
2439 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2440 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2441 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2442 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2445 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2446 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2447 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2450 ** Scheduled for removal
2452 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2453 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2455 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2456 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2457 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2458 command to unlink a directory.
2460 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2461 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2462 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2463 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2467 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2468 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2469 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2470 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2471 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2472 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2476 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2477 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2479 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2481 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2482 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2483 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2485 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2486 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2489 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2490 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2492 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2493 list directories before files.
2495 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2496 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2497 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2498 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2501 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2503 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2505 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2506 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2507 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2509 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2510 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2514 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2515 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2516 usually printing nothing.
2518 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2520 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2521 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2522 them with hard-linked directories.
2524 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2525 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2526 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2528 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2529 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2530 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2532 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2535 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2536 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2538 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2539 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2541 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2542 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2544 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2545 all command-line arguments.
2547 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2549 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2551 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2552 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2554 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2556 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2557 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2558 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2559 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2560 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2562 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2563 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2565 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2566 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2567 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2568 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2570 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2572 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2576 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2577 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2579 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2580 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2582 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2583 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2585 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2586 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2588 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2589 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2591 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2593 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2594 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2595 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2598 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2600 ** Build-related bug fixes
2602 installing .mo files would fail
2605 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2609 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2611 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2614 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2618 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2619 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2623 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2625 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2626 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2628 ** Deprecated options
2630 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2631 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2633 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2637 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2639 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2640 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2641 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2642 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2644 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2647 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2653 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2658 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2660 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2662 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2663 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2664 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2666 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2667 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2668 problematic usages. These include:
2670 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2671 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2672 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2673 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2674 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2675 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2676 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2677 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2678 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2680 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2681 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2683 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2684 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2685 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2686 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2688 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2689 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2690 between binary and text files.
2692 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2696 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2700 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2701 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2703 head tac tail tee tr
2704 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2706 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2707 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2709 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2710 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2711 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2713 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2715 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2717 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2718 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2719 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2723 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2725 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2726 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2728 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2729 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2730 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2734 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2735 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2739 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2740 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2741 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2745 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2746 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2750 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2752 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2754 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2758 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2759 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2760 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2762 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2763 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2764 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2765 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2766 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2768 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2772 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2773 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2774 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2776 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2778 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2779 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2780 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2781 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2783 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2785 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2786 rather than silently wrapping around.
2788 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2789 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2791 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2792 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2794 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2795 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2796 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2797 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2799 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2801 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2803 ** Improved robustness
2805 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2806 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2807 no matter how large the result.
2809 ** Improved portability
2811 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2812 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2814 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2816 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2817 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2818 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2820 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2821 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2825 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2826 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2828 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2830 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2831 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2832 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2833 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2835 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2836 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2838 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2839 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2840 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2842 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2844 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2845 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2847 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2848 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2850 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2852 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2853 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2855 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2856 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2858 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2859 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2860 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2862 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2864 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2866 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2870 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2872 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2873 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2874 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2876 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2877 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2879 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2880 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2881 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2883 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2884 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2886 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2887 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2888 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2889 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2891 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2892 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2894 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2895 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2896 the file system does not support it.
2898 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2900 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2901 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2903 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2905 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2906 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2908 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2909 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2910 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2911 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2913 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2914 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2917 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2918 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2919 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2920 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2922 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2923 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2924 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2925 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2927 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2928 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2930 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2932 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2933 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2934 reporting incorrect results.
2938 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2939 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2941 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2944 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2946 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2947 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2949 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2950 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2952 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2955 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2956 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2957 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2958 the file name does not look like a page range.
2960 printf has several changes:
2962 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2963 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2965 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2966 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2967 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2969 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2970 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2973 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2974 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2976 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2977 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2979 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2981 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2982 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2984 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2986 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2988 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2989 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2990 when first encountering the directory.
2994 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2995 output; POSIX requires this.
2997 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2998 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3000 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3002 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3003 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3005 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3006 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3008 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3009 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3010 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3011 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3012 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3013 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3014 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3016 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3017 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3018 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3020 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3021 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3023 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3025 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3027 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3028 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3029 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3030 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3032 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3036 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3037 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3038 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3039 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3040 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3042 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3043 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3044 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3046 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3047 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3049 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3050 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3052 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3053 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3054 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3055 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3056 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3058 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3059 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3061 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3062 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3064 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3066 nocreat do not create the output file
3067 excl fail if the output file already exists
3068 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3069 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3071 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3073 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3074 direct use direct I/O for data
3075 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3076 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3077 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3078 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3079 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3081 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3083 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3084 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3087 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3088 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3089 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3090 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3091 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3092 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3094 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3095 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3097 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3100 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3102 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3104 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3105 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3107 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3108 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3109 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3111 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3112 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3113 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3115 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3117 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3118 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3120 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3121 for compatibility with bash.
3123 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3125 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3126 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3127 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3128 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3130 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3131 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3133 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3134 ls supports TABSIZE.
3135 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3136 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3137 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3139 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3142 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3144 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3145 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3146 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3147 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3148 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3149 an offset, not as a file name.
3151 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3152 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3154 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3155 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3157 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3158 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3160 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3161 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3162 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3164 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3165 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3167 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3168 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3172 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3174 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3176 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3180 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3181 or more arguments between partitions.
3183 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3184 holes in the destination.
3186 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3187 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3188 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3189 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3190 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3191 terminates immediately.
3193 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3195 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3197 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3198 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3199 not the empty string.
3201 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3202 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3206 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3207 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3208 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3211 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3218 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3222 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3223 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3225 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3226 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3228 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3229 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3230 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3233 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3237 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3238 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3240 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3241 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3243 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3244 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3245 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3247 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3249 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3252 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3254 ** Configuration option
3256 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3257 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3261 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3262 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3266 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3267 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3268 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3271 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3272 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3273 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3274 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3275 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3276 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3277 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3280 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3284 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3285 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3286 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3288 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3289 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3291 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3293 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3294 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3295 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3296 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3298 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3300 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3301 not just the ones that reference directories
3303 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3304 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3306 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3307 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3308 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3310 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3311 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3312 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3313 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3314 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3315 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3317 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3322 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3323 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3325 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3327 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3329 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3331 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3332 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3334 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3335 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3337 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3339 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3343 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3345 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3347 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3348 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3349 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3350 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3351 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3353 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3354 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3356 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3357 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3359 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3360 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3362 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3363 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3364 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3368 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3369 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3370 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3371 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3372 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3373 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3374 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3375 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3376 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3377 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3378 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3379 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3380 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3381 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3383 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3385 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3386 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3388 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3390 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3392 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3393 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3395 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3397 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3398 without a trailing newline.
3400 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3401 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3403 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3406 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3410 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3412 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3414 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3415 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3416 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3417 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3419 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3421 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3422 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3423 be printed without leading spaces.
3425 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3426 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3431 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3432 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3433 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3435 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3437 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3438 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3440 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3441 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3443 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3444 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3446 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3448 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3450 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3452 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3453 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3455 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3457 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3459 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3460 byte offsets are specified.
3463 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3466 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3469 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3470 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3471 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3472 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3473 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3474 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3475 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3476 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3477 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3478 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3479 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3480 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3481 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3482 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3483 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3484 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3485 directory where M has write access.
3486 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3487 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3488 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3491 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3492 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3493 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3494 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3495 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3496 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3497 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3498 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3499 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3500 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3501 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3502 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3503 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3504 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3505 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3506 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3507 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3508 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3509 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3510 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3511 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3512 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3513 appeared one additional time.
3515 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3516 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3517 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3518 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3521 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3522 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3523 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3524 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3525 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3526 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3527 if there were more than 338.
3529 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3530 - false --help now exits nonzero
3533 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3534 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3535 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3536 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3539 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3540 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3541 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3542 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3543 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3546 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3547 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3548 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3549 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3550 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3551 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3552 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3555 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3556 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3557 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3558 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3559 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3560 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3562 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3563 under certain unusual conditions
3564 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3565 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3568 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3569 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3570 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3571 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3572 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3573 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3574 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3575 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3576 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3577 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3578 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3579 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3580 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3581 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3582 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3583 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3586 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3587 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3590 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3591 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3592 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3593 involving hard-linked directories
3594 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3595 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3596 character-special and block files
3599 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3600 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3601 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3602 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3603 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3604 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3605 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3606 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3607 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3609 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3610 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3611 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3612 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3613 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3614 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3615 specified on the command line.
3616 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3617 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3618 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3619 the first file untouched.
3620 * readlink: new program
3621 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3622 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3623 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3624 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3625 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3626 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3629 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3630 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3631 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3632 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3633 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3634 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3635 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3636 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3637 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3638 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3639 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3640 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3642 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3643 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3644 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3646 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3647 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3648 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3649 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3650 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3651 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3652 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3653 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3656 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3657 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3660 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3661 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3662 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3663 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3664 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3665 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3666 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3669 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3670 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3672 ========================================================================
3673 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3674 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3677 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3679 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3680 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3681 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3682 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3683 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3684 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3685 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3686 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3687 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3688 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3689 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3690 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3692 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3693 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3694 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3695 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3697 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3700 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3702 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3703 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3704 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3705 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3706 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3707 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3708 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3711 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3712 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3713 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3714 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3715 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3716 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3717 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3718 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3719 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3720 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3721 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3722 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3723 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3724 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3725 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3726 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3728 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3729 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3731 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3732 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3733 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3734 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3735 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3736 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3738 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3739 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3740 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3741 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3742 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3743 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3744 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3746 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3747 the source files in the following example:
3748 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3749 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3750 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3751 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3752 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3753 links between source files with --preserve=links
3754 * cp accepts new options:
3755 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3756 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3757 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3758 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3759 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3760 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3761 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3762 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3763 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3765 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3766 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3767 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3768 even though it's older than dest.
3769 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3770 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3771 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3772 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3773 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3775 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3776 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3777 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3778 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3779 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3780 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3781 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3783 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3784 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3785 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3787 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3788 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3789 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3790 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3791 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3792 This is the default.
3794 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3795 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3796 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3797 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3798 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3800 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3803 ========================================================================
3804 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3805 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3808 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3809 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3811 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3812 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3813 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3814 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3815 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3817 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3818 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3819 that specifies a non-directory
3822 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3823 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3824 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3825 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3826 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3827 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3828 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3829 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3830 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3831 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3832 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3833 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3834 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3835 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3836 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3837 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3838 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3839 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3840 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3841 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3842 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3843 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3844 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3845 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3847 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3848 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3849 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3851 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3853 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3854 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3856 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3857 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3858 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3859 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3860 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3862 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3863 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3864 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3865 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3866 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3868 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3870 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3871 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3872 * still more portability fixes
3873 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3874 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3876 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3878 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3880 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3882 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3883 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3884 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3885 there is any time remaining
3886 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3888 ========================================================================
3889 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3890 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3892 This package began as the union of the following:
3893 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3895 ========================================================================
3897 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3899 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3900 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3901 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3902 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3903 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3904 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.