1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
8 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
11 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
12 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
15 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
16 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
17 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
18 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
19 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
21 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
22 System V style platforms where this information is available only
23 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
25 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
28 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
31 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
32 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
33 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
35 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
36 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
40 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
41 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
43 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
44 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
46 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
47 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
49 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
50 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
51 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
52 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
54 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
55 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
56 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
58 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
59 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
60 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
62 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
63 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
66 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
67 only doing so if --retry is specified.
68 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
70 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
71 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
73 ** Changes in behavior
75 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
77 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
78 values for any argument.
80 stat now outputs nanosecond information for time stamps even if
81 they are out of localtime range.
83 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
84 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
85 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
86 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
90 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
91 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
93 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
95 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
96 written to a terminal.
98 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
99 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
101 stat and tail now know about "prl_fs" (a parallels file system),
102 "m1fs" (a Plexistor file system), "wslfs" (Windows Subsystem for Linux),
103 and "smb2". stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
104 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", inotify for "m1fs",
105 and attempts inotify for "wslfs".
107 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
108 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
112 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
113 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
117 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
119 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
120 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
122 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
125 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
129 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
130 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
131 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
134 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
135 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
137 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
138 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
139 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
141 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
142 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
144 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
145 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
148 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
149 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
151 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
152 that specify an offset for the first field.
153 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
155 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
156 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
160 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
161 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
165 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
166 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
168 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
169 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
170 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
171 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
172 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
174 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
175 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
176 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
178 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
179 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
180 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
182 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
183 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
185 ** Changes in behavior
187 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
188 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
190 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
191 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
193 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
194 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
196 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
197 when outputting to a terminal.
199 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
203 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
204 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
206 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
207 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
209 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
210 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
211 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
213 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
214 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
216 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
217 upon detection of a directory cycle.
218 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
220 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
222 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
223 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
224 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
226 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
227 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
230 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
234 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
235 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
237 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
238 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
240 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
241 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
244 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
245 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
246 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
247 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
249 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
250 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
251 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
252 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
254 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
255 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
257 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
258 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
260 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
261 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
262 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
264 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
265 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
266 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
268 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
269 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
270 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
272 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
273 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
274 character at the 4GiB position.
275 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
277 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
278 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
280 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
281 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
283 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
284 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
285 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
287 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
288 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
290 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
291 replaced before inotify watches were created.
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
294 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
295 [bug introduced in the beginning]
297 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
298 when those files are being created or renamed.
299 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
303 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
304 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
305 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
306 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
308 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
309 on stderr approximately every second.
311 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
312 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
314 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
315 other than the default newline character.
317 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
318 a useful setting with high latency links.
320 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
321 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
323 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
324 and output errors in general.
326 ** Changes in behavior
328 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
329 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
330 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
331 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
333 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
334 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
335 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
336 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
337 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
339 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
340 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
342 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
344 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
345 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
347 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
348 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
352 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
353 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
355 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
356 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
358 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
359 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
361 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
362 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
364 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
366 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
367 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
368 documentation are provided.
371 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
375 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
376 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
378 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
379 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
380 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
381 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
383 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
384 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
385 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
386 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
388 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
389 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
391 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
392 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
394 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
395 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
396 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
397 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
398 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
399 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
413 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
415 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
416 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
417 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
418 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
419 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
420 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
422 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
423 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
424 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
427 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
428 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
429 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
431 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
432 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
433 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
434 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
436 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
437 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
438 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
440 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
441 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
442 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
444 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
445 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
446 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
447 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
450 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
451 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
452 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
454 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
455 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
457 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
458 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
459 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
461 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
462 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
464 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
465 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
467 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
468 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
470 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
471 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
473 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
474 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
475 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
477 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
478 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
482 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
483 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
485 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
486 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
487 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
488 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
489 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
490 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
491 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
492 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
493 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
494 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
495 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
496 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
497 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
498 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
499 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
500 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
501 it suitable for embedded system.
503 ** Changes in behavior
505 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
506 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
508 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
509 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
511 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
512 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
513 will result in the delayed output of lines.
515 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
516 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
517 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
521 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
522 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
523 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
525 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
527 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
528 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
529 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
531 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
532 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
533 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
534 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
536 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
537 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
539 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
540 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
541 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
544 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
548 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
549 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
550 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
552 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
553 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
554 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
555 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
557 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
558 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
559 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
561 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
562 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
564 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
566 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
567 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
568 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
570 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
571 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
572 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
574 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
575 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
576 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
577 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
579 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
580 from the source, when copying across file systems.
581 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
583 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
584 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
585 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
587 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
588 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
590 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
591 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
592 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
593 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
595 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
596 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
597 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
599 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
600 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
601 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
605 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
606 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
607 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
609 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
610 used to identify the split points.
612 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
613 command line argument through to the output.
615 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
618 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
619 a NUL instead of a white space character.
621 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
622 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
624 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
626 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
627 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
628 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
630 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
631 unique groups with empty lines.
633 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
634 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
636 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
639 ** Changes in behavior
641 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
642 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
643 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
644 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
646 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
647 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
649 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
650 not just the transfer counts.
652 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
654 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
655 as per the documented interface.
659 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
661 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
662 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
663 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
664 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
666 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
667 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
668 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
669 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
671 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
672 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
673 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
675 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
676 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
678 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
679 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
681 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
685 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
688 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
692 numfmt: reformat numbers
696 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
697 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
698 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
700 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
701 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
702 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
704 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
705 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
709 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
712 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
713 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
716 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
717 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
718 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
720 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
721 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
722 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
724 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
725 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
726 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
728 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
729 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
730 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
732 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
733 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
735 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
736 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
738 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
739 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
740 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
742 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
743 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
744 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
746 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
747 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
748 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
750 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
751 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
752 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
753 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
755 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
756 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
757 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
759 ** Changes in behavior
761 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
762 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
763 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
764 'total' in the target column.
766 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
767 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
768 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
770 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
771 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
773 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
774 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
778 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
779 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
781 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
782 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
784 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
788 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
789 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
790 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
791 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
792 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
793 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
794 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
795 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
796 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
797 for a patched distribution package.
799 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
800 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
802 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
803 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
804 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
805 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
808 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
812 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
814 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
815 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
816 sha384sum and sha512sum.
820 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
821 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
822 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
823 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
824 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
826 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
827 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
829 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
830 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
831 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
832 eventually exits nonzero.
834 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
835 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
836 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
837 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
838 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
840 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
841 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
842 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
844 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
845 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
846 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
848 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
849 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
850 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
852 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
853 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
854 Before, this would infloop:
855 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
856 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
858 ** Changes in behavior
860 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
864 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
865 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
866 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
867 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
868 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
871 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
872 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
873 format-changing options.
875 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
876 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
877 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
878 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
879 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
883 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
884 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
885 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
886 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
887 are run without following the instructions in README.
889 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
890 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
891 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
892 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
893 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
894 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
895 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
898 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
902 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
903 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
904 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
905 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
907 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
908 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
909 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
910 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
912 sort -u could read freed memory.
913 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
914 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
919 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
920 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
921 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
922 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
925 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
929 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
930 processes will not intersperse their output.
931 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
933 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
934 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
935 date: invalid date '\260'
936 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
938 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
939 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
940 lines output by df, can work reliably.
941 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
943 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
944 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
945 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
947 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
948 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
949 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
950 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
951 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
952 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
954 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
955 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
957 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
958 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
960 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
961 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
962 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
964 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
965 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
966 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
970 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
972 ** Changes in behavior
974 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
975 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
976 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
977 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
978 have any reason to include it here.
982 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
983 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
984 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
986 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
987 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
988 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
991 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
995 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
996 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
997 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
998 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
999 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1000 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1002 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1003 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1004 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1005 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1006 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1007 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1008 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1010 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1013 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1014 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1018 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1019 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1021 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1023 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1025 ** Changes in behavior
1027 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1028 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1029 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1031 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1032 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1035 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1039 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1040 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1041 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1042 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1043 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1044 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1045 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1046 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1048 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1049 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1050 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1051 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1052 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1054 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1055 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1057 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1058 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1060 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1061 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1063 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1064 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1066 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1067 additional static suffix to output file names.
1069 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1070 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1071 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1073 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1074 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1078 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1079 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1080 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1082 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1083 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1084 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1085 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1086 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1087 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1089 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1090 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1091 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1092 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1093 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1095 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1096 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1097 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1098 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1102 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1103 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1104 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1106 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1107 instead of causing a usage failure.
1109 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1112 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1116 realpath: print resolved file names.
1120 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1121 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1123 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1124 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1126 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1127 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1128 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1129 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1130 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1131 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1133 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1134 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1135 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1137 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1138 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1139 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1141 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1142 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1143 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1144 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1145 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1147 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1149 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1150 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1152 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1153 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1154 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1156 ** Changes in behavior
1158 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1159 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1160 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1161 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1162 usually-short referent instead.
1164 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1165 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1166 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1167 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1170 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1174 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1175 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1176 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1178 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1179 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1181 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1186 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1187 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1189 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1190 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1191 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1192 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1194 ** Changes in behavior
1196 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1197 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1198 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1202 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1203 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1204 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1211 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1212 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1213 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1215 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1216 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1218 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1219 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1220 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1221 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1222 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1224 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1225 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1226 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1227 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1228 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1229 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1230 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1231 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1233 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1234 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1236 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1237 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1239 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1240 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1242 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1243 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1244 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1246 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1247 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1248 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1249 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1251 ** Changes in behavior
1253 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1254 when -v or -c specified.
1256 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1257 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1261 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1262 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1263 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1264 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1265 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1267 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1268 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1269 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1271 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1272 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1273 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1274 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1275 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1276 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1277 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1279 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1280 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1281 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1285 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1286 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1288 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1291 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1292 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1294 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1295 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1297 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1298 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1300 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1302 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1306 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1307 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1309 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1312 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1316 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1317 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1319 ** Changes in behavior
1321 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1322 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1323 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1324 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1325 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1326 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1327 resolved for 2.6.39.
1328 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1329 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1330 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1334 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1337 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1341 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1342 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1343 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1345 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1346 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1349 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1350 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1351 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1353 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1354 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1356 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1357 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1359 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1362 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1363 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1367 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1368 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1369 processed portion thereof.
1371 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1372 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1374 ** Changes in behavior
1376 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1377 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1378 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1380 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1381 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1382 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1384 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1385 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1387 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1388 Use --preserve-context instead.
1390 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1393 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1397 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1398 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1399 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1400 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1401 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1403 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1404 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1406 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1407 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1408 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1410 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1411 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1413 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1414 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1418 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1419 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1420 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1421 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1422 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1423 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1424 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1425 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1427 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1428 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1429 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1431 ** Changes in behavior
1433 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1434 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1435 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1438 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1442 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1443 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1444 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1447 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1451 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1452 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
1454 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1455 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1457 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1458 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1460 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1461 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1462 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1463 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1465 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1466 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1468 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1469 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1470 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1472 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1474 ** Changes in behavior
1476 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1477 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1478 to the number of available processors.
1482 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1485 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1489 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1490 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1491 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1492 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1494 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1495 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1496 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1498 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1499 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1501 ** Changes in behavior
1503 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1504 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1506 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1507 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1508 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1509 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
1510 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1511 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1513 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1514 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1515 the same way as the others.
1517 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1518 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1521 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1525 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1526 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1527 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1529 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1530 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1532 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1533 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1534 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1536 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1537 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1539 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1540 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1542 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1543 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1544 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1546 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1547 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1548 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1549 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1553 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1554 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1556 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1559 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1560 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1562 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1564 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1565 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1566 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1568 ** Changes in behavior
1570 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1571 rather than its aliased target.
1573 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1574 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1575 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1577 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1578 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1579 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1580 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1581 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1582 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1583 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1584 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1586 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1588 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1590 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1591 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1594 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1595 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1596 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1597 control like taskset for example.
1599 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1601 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1602 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1603 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1604 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1605 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1606 includes %C when context information is available.
1608 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1609 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1610 rather than a file system attribute.
1612 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1613 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1614 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1615 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1617 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1618 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1619 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1621 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1622 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1623 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1626 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1630 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1631 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1633 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1635 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1636 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1638 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1639 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1640 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1641 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1643 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1644 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1645 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1649 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1650 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1652 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1653 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1654 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1656 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1657 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1658 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1659 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1660 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1661 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1662 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1663 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1664 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1666 ** Changes in behavior
1668 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1669 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1671 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1672 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1675 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1679 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1680 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1681 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1682 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1686 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1687 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1689 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1690 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1691 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1692 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1694 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1695 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1696 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1699 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1703 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1704 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1705 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1707 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1708 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1709 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1711 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1712 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1714 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1715 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1716 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1717 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1719 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1720 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1721 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1723 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1724 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1725 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1726 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1728 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1729 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1730 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1732 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1733 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1734 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1735 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1737 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1738 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1739 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1741 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1742 processes will not intersperse their output.
1743 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1746 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1750 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1751 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1753 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1754 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1756 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1757 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1758 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1759 the presence of the empty string argument.
1760 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1762 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1763 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1764 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1765 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1767 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1768 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1770 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1771 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1772 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1774 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1775 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1776 and with a malicious user on the same system
1777 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1778 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1781 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1785 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1786 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1787 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1789 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1790 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1791 offending directory and all "contents."
1793 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1794 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1795 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1797 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1798 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1799 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1801 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1802 processes will not intersperse their output.
1803 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1804 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1806 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1807 output the name of the file to stdout.
1808 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1810 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1811 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1812 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1814 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1815 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1818 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1819 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1820 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1822 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1823 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1824 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1825 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1826 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1827 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1829 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1830 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1831 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1832 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1834 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1835 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1837 ** Changes in behavior
1839 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1840 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1841 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1842 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1843 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1845 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1846 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1847 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1848 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1850 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1852 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1853 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1854 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1855 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1856 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1860 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1864 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1865 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1867 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1868 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1870 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1871 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1872 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1874 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1875 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1878 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1882 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1883 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1884 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1886 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1887 to accommodate leap seconds.
1888 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1890 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1891 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1892 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1894 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1896 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1897 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1898 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1900 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1901 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1902 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1903 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1904 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1908 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1909 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1910 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1911 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1913 ** Changes in behavior
1915 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1916 environment variable is set.
1918 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1919 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1920 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1924 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1925 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1926 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1927 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1929 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1930 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1931 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1932 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1936 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1937 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1938 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1940 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1941 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1942 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1943 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1944 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1945 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1946 another improvement:
1948 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1949 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1952 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1956 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1957 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1958 and libraries tested at configure time.
1959 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1961 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1962 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1964 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1965 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1967 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1968 printing a summary to stderr.
1969 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1971 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1972 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1973 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1975 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1976 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1978 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1979 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1980 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1981 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1983 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1984 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1985 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1986 which is relatively unusual.
1987 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1989 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1990 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1991 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1992 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1993 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1994 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1995 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1999 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2000 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2001 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2002 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2003 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2007 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2008 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2010 ** Changes in behavior
2012 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2013 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2014 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2015 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2016 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2019 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2023 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2024 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2026 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2027 before data copying has started.
2029 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2030 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2032 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2033 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2034 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2035 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2037 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2038 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2039 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2040 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2042 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2047 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2048 for its standard streams.
2050 ** Changes in behavior
2052 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2053 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2054 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2055 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2056 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2057 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2059 ** Deprecated options
2061 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2062 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2066 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2068 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2069 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2070 a btrfs file system.
2072 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
2074 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2075 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2077 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2078 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2081 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2085 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2086 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2087 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2088 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2090 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2091 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2092 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2093 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2094 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2099 make check: two tests have been corrected
2103 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2104 inherited from gnulib.
2107 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2111 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2112 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2113 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2114 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2116 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2117 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2119 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2121 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2122 systems without xattr support.
2124 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2125 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2126 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2128 ** Changes in behavior
2130 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2131 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2132 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2133 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2135 ** Improved robustness
2137 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2138 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2139 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2140 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2141 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2142 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2143 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2144 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2145 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2149 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2150 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2152 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2153 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2154 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2155 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2156 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2159 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2163 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2164 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2165 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2169 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2170 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2171 data was read, or on process exit.
2172 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2174 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2175 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2176 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2177 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2179 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2180 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2181 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2182 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2184 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2185 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2187 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2188 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2190 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2191 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2192 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2194 ** Changes in behavior
2196 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2197 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2198 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2200 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2201 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2203 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2204 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2205 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2208 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2212 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2214 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2215 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2216 install: Never copies xattrs
2218 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2219 from overwriting any existing destination file
2221 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2222 mode where this feature is available.
2224 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2225 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2226 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2227 do not modify the destination at all.
2229 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2231 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2235 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2236 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2238 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2240 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2241 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2243 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2244 processing the first file name
2246 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2247 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2248 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2249 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2251 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2252 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2254 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2255 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2258 ** Changes in behavior
2260 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2261 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2263 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2264 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2265 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2267 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2268 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2270 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2272 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2273 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2274 is still marked with a '+'.
2277 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2281 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2282 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2286 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2287 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2288 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2289 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2290 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2291 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2293 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2294 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2296 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2297 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2299 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2301 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2302 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2303 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2305 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2306 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2308 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2309 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2310 used to factor large numbers.
2312 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2315 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2317 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2319 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2320 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2322 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2323 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2324 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2325 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2327 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2328 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2329 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2331 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2332 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2336 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2338 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2339 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2341 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2342 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2344 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2346 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2347 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2351 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2352 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2353 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2355 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2357 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2358 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2359 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2361 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2362 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2363 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2365 ** Changes in behavior
2367 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2368 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2371 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2375 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2376 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2377 'futimens' system calls.
2381 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2383 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2384 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2385 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2387 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2388 with no USERNAME argument.
2390 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2391 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2392 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2394 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2395 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2396 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2397 number of fields for some inputs.
2399 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2400 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2402 ** Changes in behavior
2404 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2405 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2408 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2412 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2414 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2415 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2416 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2417 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2419 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2420 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2422 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2423 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2425 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2426 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2428 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2429 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2430 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2431 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2433 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2434 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2435 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2436 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2437 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2438 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2440 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2441 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2443 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2444 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2445 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2447 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2448 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2450 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2451 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2453 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2454 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2455 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2456 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2458 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2459 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2461 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2462 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2464 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2465 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2466 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2470 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2471 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2473 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2474 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2475 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2476 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2480 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2481 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2483 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2485 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2489 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2490 which have negative errno values.
2494 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2498 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2502 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2503 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2506 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2510 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2511 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2512 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2514 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2515 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2516 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2517 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2521 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2522 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2523 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2524 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2527 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2531 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2533 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2534 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2535 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2538 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2542 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2543 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2545 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2547 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2549 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2551 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2555 ** Changes in behavior
2557 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2558 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2560 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2561 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2563 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2564 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2565 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2569 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2570 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2571 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2572 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2573 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2574 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2575 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2576 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2577 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2578 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2579 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2581 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2582 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2583 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2586 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2589 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2590 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2591 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2593 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2594 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2595 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2598 ** New build options
2600 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2601 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2602 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2603 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2605 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2606 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2607 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2608 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2609 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2610 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2611 of "make check" fail.
2613 ** Remove deprecated options
2615 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2616 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2617 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2618 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2619 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2621 ** Improved robustness
2623 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2624 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2625 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2626 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2627 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2628 loss of the contents of a/f.
2630 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2631 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2635 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2636 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2637 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2639 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2640 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2641 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2642 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2644 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2645 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2646 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2647 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2648 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2649 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2650 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2651 destination is a symlink.
2653 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2655 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2656 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2658 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2659 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2661 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2663 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2664 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2666 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2667 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2669 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2672 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2673 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2675 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2676 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2678 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2679 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2680 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2681 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2683 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2684 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2685 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2687 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2688 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2689 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2691 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2692 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2693 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2694 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2696 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2697 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2698 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2700 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2701 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2703 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2704 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2706 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2708 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2709 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2710 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2712 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2713 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2715 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2716 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2718 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2719 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2721 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2722 [present in the original version]
2725 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2729 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2731 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2732 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2733 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2735 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2736 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2738 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2742 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2743 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2745 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2746 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2748 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2749 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2751 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2752 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2753 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2754 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2755 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2756 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2758 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2759 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2762 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2763 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2765 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2768 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2769 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2770 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2772 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2773 directory is unreadable.
2775 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2776 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2777 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2779 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2780 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2781 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2782 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2783 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2786 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2787 Before it would print nothing.
2789 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2791 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2792 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2793 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2794 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2795 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2796 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2797 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2798 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2800 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2804 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2805 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2806 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2808 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2809 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2810 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2811 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2814 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2818 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2819 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2820 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2821 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2822 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2823 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2824 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2826 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2827 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2828 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2829 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2830 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2831 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2832 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2833 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2835 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2836 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2837 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2840 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2844 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2845 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2847 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2848 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2849 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2851 ** Improved robustness
2853 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2854 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2855 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2858 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2862 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2863 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2864 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2865 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2866 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2868 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2872 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2875 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2879 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2880 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2881 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2882 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2884 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2885 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2887 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2888 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2889 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2892 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2894 ** Improved robustness
2896 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2897 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2899 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2900 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2901 or NFS-mounted partition.
2903 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2904 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2908 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2909 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2910 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2911 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2912 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2913 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2915 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2916 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2918 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2919 or neglect to report file removal.
2921 For the "groups" command:
2923 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2924 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2926 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2928 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2930 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2934 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2935 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2938 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2940 ** Changes in behavior
2942 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2943 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2944 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2945 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2947 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2948 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2949 a final './' or '../' component.
2951 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2952 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2953 this only for pipes.
2955 ** Infrastructure changes
2957 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2958 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2959 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2960 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2964 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2965 name is "." or "..".
2967 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2968 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2969 dirent.d_type support.
2971 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2972 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2974 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2975 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2976 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2977 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2980 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2982 ** Changes in behavior
2984 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2988 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2989 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2993 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2994 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2995 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2997 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2998 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3000 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3001 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3003 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3005 ** Improved robustness
3007 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3008 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3009 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3011 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3012 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3015 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3016 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3018 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3019 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3021 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3022 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3024 ** Changes in behavior
3026 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3027 where the two are distinct.
3029 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3030 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3031 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3032 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3033 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3034 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3035 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3036 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3037 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3038 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3039 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3040 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3041 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3042 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3043 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3044 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3045 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3047 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3048 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3049 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3051 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3052 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3053 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3054 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3057 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3058 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3062 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3063 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3064 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3065 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3067 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3068 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3069 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3071 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3072 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3073 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3074 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3075 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3078 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3079 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3081 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3082 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3083 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3084 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3086 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3087 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3088 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3090 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3091 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3092 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3093 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3095 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3096 and sticky) with the -m option.
3098 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3099 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3100 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3101 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3102 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3104 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3105 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3107 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3111 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3112 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3113 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3114 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3116 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3118 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3120 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3121 silently ignoring one of them.
3123 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3124 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3125 containing this change was 5.92.
3127 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3128 automatically newline terminated.
3130 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3131 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3132 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3133 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3136 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3137 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3138 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3141 ** Scheduled for removal
3143 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3144 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3146 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3147 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3148 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3149 command to unlink a directory.
3151 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3152 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3153 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3154 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3158 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3159 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3160 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3161 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3162 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3163 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3167 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3168 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3170 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3172 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3173 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3174 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3176 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3177 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3180 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3181 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3183 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3184 list directories before files.
3186 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3187 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3188 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3189 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3192 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3194 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3196 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3197 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3198 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3200 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3201 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3205 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3206 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3207 usually printing nothing.
3209 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3211 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3212 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3213 them with hard-linked directories.
3215 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3216 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3217 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3219 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3220 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3221 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3223 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3226 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3227 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3229 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3230 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3232 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3233 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3235 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3236 all command-line arguments.
3238 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3240 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3242 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3243 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3245 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3247 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3248 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3249 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3250 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3251 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3253 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3254 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3256 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3257 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3258 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3259 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3261 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3263 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3267 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3268 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3270 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3271 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3273 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3274 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3276 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3277 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3279 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3280 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3282 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3284 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3285 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3286 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3289 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3291 ** Build-related bug fixes
3293 installing .mo files would fail
3296 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3300 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3302 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3305 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3309 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3310 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3314 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3316 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3317 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3319 ** Deprecated options
3321 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3322 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3324 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3328 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3330 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3331 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3332 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3333 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3335 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3338 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3344 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3349 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3351 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3353 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3354 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3355 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3357 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3358 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3359 problematic usages. These include:
3361 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3362 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3363 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3364 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3365 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3366 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3367 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3368 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3369 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3371 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3372 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3374 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3375 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3376 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3377 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3379 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3380 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3381 between binary and text files.
3383 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3387 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3391 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3392 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3394 head tac tail tee tr
3395 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3397 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3398 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3400 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3401 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3402 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3404 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3406 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3408 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3409 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3410 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3414 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3416 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3417 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3419 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3420 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3421 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3425 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3426 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3430 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3431 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3432 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3436 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3437 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3441 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3443 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3445 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3449 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3450 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3451 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3453 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3454 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3455 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3456 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3457 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3459 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3463 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3464 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3465 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3467 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3469 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3470 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3471 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3472 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3474 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3476 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3477 rather than silently wrapping around.
3479 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3480 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3482 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3483 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3485 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3486 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3487 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3488 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3490 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3492 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3494 ** Improved robustness
3496 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3497 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3498 no matter how large the result.
3500 ** Improved portability
3502 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3503 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3505 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3507 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3508 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3509 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3511 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3512 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3516 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3517 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3519 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3521 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3522 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3523 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3524 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3526 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3527 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3529 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3530 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3531 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3533 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3535 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3536 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3538 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3539 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3541 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3543 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3544 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3546 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3547 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3549 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3550 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3551 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3553 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3555 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3557 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3561 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3563 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3564 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3565 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3567 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3568 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3570 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3571 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3572 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3574 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3575 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3577 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3578 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3579 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3580 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3582 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3583 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3585 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3586 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3587 the file system does not support it.
3589 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3591 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3592 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3594 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3596 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3597 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3599 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3600 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3601 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3602 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3604 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3605 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3608 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3609 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3610 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3611 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3613 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3614 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3615 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3616 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3618 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3619 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3621 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3623 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3624 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3625 reporting incorrect results.
3629 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3630 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3632 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3635 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3637 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3638 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3640 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3641 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3643 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3646 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3647 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3648 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3649 the file name does not look like a page range.
3651 printf has several changes:
3653 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3654 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3656 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3657 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3658 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3660 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3661 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3664 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3665 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3667 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3668 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3670 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3672 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3673 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3675 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3677 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3679 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3680 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3681 when first encountering the directory.
3685 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3686 output; POSIX requires this.
3688 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3689 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3691 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3693 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3694 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3696 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3697 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3699 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3700 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3701 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3702 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3703 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3704 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3705 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3707 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3708 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3709 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3711 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3712 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3714 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3716 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3718 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3719 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3720 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3721 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3723 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3727 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3728 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3729 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3730 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3731 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3733 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3734 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3735 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3737 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3738 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3740 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3741 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3743 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3744 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3745 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3746 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3747 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3749 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3750 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3752 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3753 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3755 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3757 nocreat do not create the output file
3758 excl fail if the output file already exists
3759 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3760 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3762 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3764 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3765 direct use direct I/O for data
3766 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3767 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3768 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3769 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3770 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3772 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3774 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3775 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3778 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3779 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3780 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3781 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3782 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3783 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3785 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3786 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3788 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3791 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3793 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3795 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3796 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3798 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3799 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3800 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3802 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3803 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3804 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3806 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3808 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3809 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3811 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3812 for compatibility with bash.
3814 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3816 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3817 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3818 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3819 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3821 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3822 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3824 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3825 ls supports TABSIZE.
3826 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3827 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3828 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3830 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3833 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3835 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3836 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3837 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3838 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3839 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3840 an offset, not as a file name.
3842 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3843 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3845 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3846 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3848 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3849 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3851 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3852 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3853 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3855 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3856 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3858 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3859 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3863 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3865 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3867 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3871 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3872 or more arguments between partitions.
3874 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3875 holes in the destination.
3877 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3878 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3879 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3880 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3881 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3882 terminates immediately.
3884 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3886 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3888 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3889 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3890 not the empty string.
3892 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3893 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3897 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3898 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3899 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3902 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3909 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3913 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3914 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3916 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3917 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3919 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3920 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3921 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3924 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3928 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3929 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3931 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3932 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3934 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3935 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3936 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3938 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3940 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3943 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3945 ** Configuration option
3947 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3948 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3952 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3953 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3957 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3958 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3959 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3962 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3963 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3964 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3965 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3966 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3967 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3968 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3971 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3975 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3976 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3977 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3979 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3980 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3982 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3984 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3985 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3986 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3987 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3989 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3991 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3992 not just the ones that reference directories
3994 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3995 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3997 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3998 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3999 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4001 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4002 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4003 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4004 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4005 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4006 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4008 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4013 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4014 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4016 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4018 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4020 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4022 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4023 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4025 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4026 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4028 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4030 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4034 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4036 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4038 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4039 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4040 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4041 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4042 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4044 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4045 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4047 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4048 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4050 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4051 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4053 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4054 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4055 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4059 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4060 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4061 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4062 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4063 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4064 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4065 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4066 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4067 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4068 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4069 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4070 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4071 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4072 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4074 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4076 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4077 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4079 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4081 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4083 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4084 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4086 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4088 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4089 without a trailing newline.
4091 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4092 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4094 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4097 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4101 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4103 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4105 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4106 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4107 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4108 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4110 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4112 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4113 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4114 be printed without leading spaces.
4116 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4117 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4122 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4123 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4124 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4126 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4128 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4129 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4131 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4132 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4134 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4135 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4137 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4139 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4141 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4143 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4144 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4146 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4148 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4150 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4151 byte offsets are specified.
4154 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4157 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4160 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4161 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4162 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4163 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4164 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4165 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4166 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4167 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4168 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4169 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4170 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4171 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4172 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4173 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4174 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4175 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4176 directory where M has write access.
4177 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4178 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4179 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4182 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4183 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4184 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4185 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4186 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4187 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4188 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4189 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4190 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4191 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4192 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4193 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4194 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4195 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4196 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4197 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4198 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4199 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4200 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4201 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4202 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4203 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4204 appeared one additional time.
4206 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4207 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4208 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4209 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4212 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4213 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4214 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4215 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4216 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4217 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4218 if there were more than 338.
4220 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4221 - false --help now exits nonzero
4224 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4225 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4226 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4227 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4230 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4231 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4232 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4233 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4234 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4237 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4238 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4239 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4240 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4241 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4242 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4243 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4246 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4247 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4248 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4249 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4250 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4251 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4253 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4254 under certain unusual conditions
4255 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4256 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4259 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4260 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4261 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4262 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4263 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4264 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4265 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4266 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4267 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4268 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4269 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4270 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4271 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4272 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4273 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4274 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4277 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4278 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4281 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4282 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4283 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4284 involving hard-linked directories
4285 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4286 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4287 character-special and block files
4290 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4291 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4292 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4293 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4294 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4295 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4296 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4297 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4298 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4300 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4301 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4302 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4303 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4304 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4305 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4306 specified on the command line.
4307 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4308 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4309 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4310 the first file untouched.
4311 * readlink: new program
4312 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4313 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4314 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4315 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4316 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4317 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4320 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4321 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4322 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4323 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4324 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4325 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4326 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4327 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4328 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4329 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4330 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4331 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4333 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4334 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4335 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4337 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4338 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4339 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4340 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4341 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4342 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4343 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4344 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4347 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4348 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4351 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4352 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4353 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4354 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4355 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4356 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4357 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4360 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4361 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4363 ========================================================================
4364 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4365 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4368 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4370 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4371 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4372 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4373 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4374 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4375 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4376 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4377 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4378 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4379 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4380 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4381 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4383 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4384 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4385 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4386 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4388 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4391 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4393 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4394 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4395 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4396 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4397 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4398 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4399 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4402 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4403 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4404 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4405 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4406 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4407 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4408 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4409 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4410 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4411 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4412 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4413 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4414 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4415 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4416 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4417 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4419 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4420 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4422 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4423 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4424 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4425 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4426 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4427 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4429 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4430 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4431 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4432 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4433 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4434 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4435 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4437 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4438 the source files in the following example:
4439 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4440 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4441 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4442 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4443 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4444 links between source files with --preserve=links
4445 * cp accepts new options:
4446 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4447 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4448 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4449 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4450 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4451 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4452 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4453 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4454 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4456 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4457 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4458 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4459 even though it's older than dest.
4460 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4461 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4462 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4463 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4464 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4466 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4467 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4468 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4469 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4470 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4471 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4472 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4474 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
4475 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4476 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
4478 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
4479 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4480 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4481 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4482 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4483 This is the default.
4485 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4486 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4487 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4488 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4489 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4491 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4494 ========================================================================
4495 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4496 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4499 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4500 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4502 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4503 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4504 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4505 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4506 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4508 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4509 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4510 that specifies a non-directory
4513 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4514 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4515 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4516 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4517 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4518 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4519 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4520 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4521 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4522 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4523 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4524 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4525 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4526 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4527 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4528 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4529 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4530 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4531 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4532 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4533 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4534 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4535 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4536 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4538 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4539 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4540 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4542 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4544 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4545 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4547 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4548 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4549 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4550 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4551 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4553 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4554 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4555 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4556 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4557 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4559 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4561 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4562 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4563 * still more portability fixes
4564 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4565 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4567 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4569 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4571 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4573 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4574 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4575 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4576 there is any time remaining
4577 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4579 ========================================================================
4580 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4581 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4583 This package began as the union of the following:
4584 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4586 ========================================================================
4588 Copyright (C) 2001-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4590 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4591 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4592 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4593 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4594 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4595 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.