1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed
8 to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.
9 They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.
11 join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.
12 For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,
13 and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000
14 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.
16 numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
17 [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]
19 wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.
20 [bug introduced in textutils-2.1]
22 ** Changes in behavior
24 base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.
25 Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.
27 base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.
28 Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.
30 basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.
31 Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.
33 ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,
34 and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.
36 wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.
37 Instead, it treats them as non white space.
41 tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.
45 wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in
49 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
53 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
54 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
55 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
57 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
58 presented with malformed checksum lines.
59 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
61 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
62 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
63 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
65 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
66 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
67 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
69 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
70 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
72 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
73 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
74 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
75 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
77 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
78 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
79 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
81 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
82 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
84 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
85 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
86 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
88 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
89 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
90 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
92 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
93 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
94 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
95 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
97 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
98 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
100 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
101 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
104 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
105 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
106 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
108 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
109 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
110 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
112 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
113 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
114 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
116 ** Changes in behavior
118 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
119 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
120 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
122 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
123 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
124 checksum utilities with cksum.
126 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
127 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
128 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
129 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
130 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
131 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
135 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
136 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
137 reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
139 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
140 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
142 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
143 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
145 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
147 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
149 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
150 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
152 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
153 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
156 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
157 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
158 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
159 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
160 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
161 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
164 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
168 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
169 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
170 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
171 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
174 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
175 Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
176 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
177 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
179 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
180 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
181 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
183 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
184 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
185 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
186 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
188 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
189 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
191 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
192 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
195 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
196 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
197 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
198 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
200 ** Changes in behavior
202 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
203 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
204 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
205 due to -n, -i, or -u.
209 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
210 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
211 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
214 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
218 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
219 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
220 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
221 total line in this case.
222 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
224 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
225 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
228 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
231 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
232 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
233 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
234 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
236 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
237 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
238 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
239 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
240 which may have resulted in data corruption.
241 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
243 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
244 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
245 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
247 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
250 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
251 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
252 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
254 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
255 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
256 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
258 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
259 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
260 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
262 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
263 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
264 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
265 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
266 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
268 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
269 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
270 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
271 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
272 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
274 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
275 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
276 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
278 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
279 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
280 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
282 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
283 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
284 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
285 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
287 ** Changes in behavior
289 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
290 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
291 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
292 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
293 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
294 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
296 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
297 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
299 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
300 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
301 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
302 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
304 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
305 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
306 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
308 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
309 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
310 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
311 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
313 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
314 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
315 This behavior is now documented.
317 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
318 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
320 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
321 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
322 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
324 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
325 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
326 from errors from the invoked command.
328 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
329 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
330 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
333 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
337 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
338 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
340 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
341 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
343 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
344 print details on how a file is being copied.
346 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
347 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
349 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
350 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
352 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
353 asked to move a file to a different file system.
355 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
356 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
358 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
359 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
361 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
362 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
366 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
367 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
368 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
369 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
370 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
372 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
373 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
375 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
376 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
378 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
379 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
380 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
382 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
383 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
384 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
386 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
387 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
389 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
390 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
391 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
392 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
395 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
399 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
400 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
401 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
403 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
404 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
405 before adjusting it to the correct value.
406 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
408 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
409 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
410 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
412 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
413 and B is in some other file system.
414 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
416 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
417 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
418 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
420 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
421 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
423 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
424 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
425 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
426 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
427 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
429 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
430 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
433 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
434 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
435 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
437 ** Changes in behavior
439 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
440 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
441 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
443 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
444 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
445 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
446 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
448 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
449 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
451 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
452 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
453 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
455 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
456 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
458 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
459 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
460 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
461 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
462 though they still work.
464 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
465 capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
466 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
468 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
469 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
471 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
472 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
473 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
475 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
476 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
477 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
478 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
482 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
483 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
485 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
486 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
488 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
489 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
493 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
494 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
496 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
497 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
498 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
501 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
503 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
504 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
505 since synchronizing can take a long time.
507 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
509 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
510 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
512 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
514 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
515 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
516 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
520 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
521 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
524 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
528 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
529 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
531 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
532 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
533 is a non regular file.
534 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
536 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
537 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
538 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
540 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
541 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
543 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
544 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
546 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
547 heavily changed during the run.
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
550 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
551 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
553 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
554 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
556 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
559 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
560 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
562 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
563 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
564 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
566 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
567 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
569 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
570 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
572 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
573 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
574 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
576 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
577 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
578 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
580 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
581 invalid combinations of case character classes.
582 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
584 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
585 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
586 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
588 ** Changes in behavior
590 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
591 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
593 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
594 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
595 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
597 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
598 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
599 that was made in release 8.32.
601 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
602 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
603 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
605 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
606 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
608 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
609 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
613 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
614 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
615 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
616 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
618 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
620 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
621 when verifying tagged format checksums.
623 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
625 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
626 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
628 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
629 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
631 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
632 NUL instead of newline.
634 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
636 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
637 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
638 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
642 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
643 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
645 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
646 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
647 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
649 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
650 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
652 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
653 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
655 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
656 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
658 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
659 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
660 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
662 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
664 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
665 where avx2 instructions are supported.
666 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
673 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
674 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
675 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
677 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
678 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
679 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
680 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
681 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
683 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
684 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
685 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
686 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
687 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
688 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
690 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
691 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
693 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
694 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
695 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
696 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
698 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
699 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
700 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
703 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
704 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
706 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
707 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
708 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
711 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
712 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
713 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
715 ** Changes in behavior
717 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
718 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
719 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
720 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
721 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
724 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
725 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
726 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
727 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
728 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
729 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
730 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
731 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
734 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
735 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
736 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
737 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
739 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
740 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
741 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
743 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
744 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
748 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
749 file creation time, where available.
751 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
752 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
754 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
755 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
756 useful on network file systems.
760 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
761 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
763 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
764 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
765 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
769 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
772 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
776 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
777 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
779 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
780 after asking the user whether to proceed.
781 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
783 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
784 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
786 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
787 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
788 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
790 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
791 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
792 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
793 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
794 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
795 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
797 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
798 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
800 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
801 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
803 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
804 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
805 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
807 ** Changes in behavior
809 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
810 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
811 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
812 end-of-options marker.
814 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
817 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
818 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
820 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
821 environment variable is set.
823 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
824 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
825 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
826 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
827 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
829 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
831 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
832 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
833 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
834 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
836 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
837 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
841 id now supports specifying multiple users.
843 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
844 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
846 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
847 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
848 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
849 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
850 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
851 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
853 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
854 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
856 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
857 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
859 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
860 signal handling before executing a program.
864 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
865 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
866 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
870 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
871 which is common in Asian locales.
873 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
874 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
876 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
877 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
880 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
884 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
885 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
886 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
887 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
888 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
889 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
891 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
892 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
893 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
894 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
896 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
897 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
898 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
899 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
900 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
901 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
903 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
904 even if it can't be traversed.
905 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
907 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
908 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
909 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
911 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
912 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
914 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
915 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
916 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
917 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
918 now silently does nothing if A exists.
919 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
921 ** Changes in behavior
923 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
924 it is self referential.
926 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
930 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
932 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
933 each processing step.
935 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
936 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
939 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
940 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
941 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
943 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
944 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
948 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
949 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
951 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
952 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
953 and tail -f uses inotify.
955 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
956 which is especially significant on macOS.
959 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
963 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
964 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
966 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
967 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
968 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
969 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
971 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
972 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
974 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
975 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
977 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
978 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
979 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
981 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
982 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
984 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
985 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
986 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
988 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
989 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
990 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
991 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
996 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
1000 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
1002 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
1003 rather than reading from the start.
1005 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
1006 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
1007 for unknown long options.
1011 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
1012 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
1015 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
1019 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
1020 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
1021 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
1022 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1024 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
1025 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
1026 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
1027 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
1028 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1030 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
1031 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
1032 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
1033 now fails instead of losing the data.
1034 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1036 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
1037 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
1038 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1040 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
1041 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
1042 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1044 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
1045 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1046 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1048 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1049 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1050 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1052 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1053 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1054 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1056 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1057 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1058 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1060 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1061 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1062 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1064 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1065 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1066 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1068 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1069 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1071 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1072 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1073 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1075 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1076 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1078 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1079 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1080 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1081 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1083 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1084 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1085 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1087 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1088 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1089 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1091 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1092 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1096 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1097 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1098 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1100 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1101 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1103 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1104 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1106 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1107 executing the subsidiary program.
1109 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1111 ** Changes in behavior
1113 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1114 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1115 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1116 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1120 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1122 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1123 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1125 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1126 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1127 is effective in this case.
1130 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1134 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1135 as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
1136 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1138 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1139 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1140 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1142 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1143 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1144 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1146 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1147 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1148 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1150 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1151 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1152 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1154 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1155 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1156 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1157 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1158 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1160 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1161 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1162 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1167 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1168 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1169 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1170 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1172 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1173 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1174 time zone is indeterminate.
1176 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1177 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1178 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1179 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1181 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1182 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1183 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1185 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1186 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1188 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1189 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1190 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1194 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1195 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1196 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1199 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1203 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1204 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1207 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1208 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1209 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1211 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1212 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1213 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1214 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1215 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1217 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1218 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1219 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1221 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1222 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1224 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1225 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1226 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1228 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1229 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1230 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1232 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1233 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1235 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1236 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1237 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1239 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1240 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1242 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1243 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1244 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1246 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1248 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1249 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1251 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1252 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1254 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1255 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1257 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1258 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1260 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1261 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1262 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1263 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1265 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1266 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1267 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1269 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1270 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1271 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1273 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1274 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1275 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1277 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1278 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1279 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1281 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1282 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1284 ** Changes in behavior
1286 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1288 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1289 values for any argument.
1291 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1292 they are out of localtime range.
1294 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1295 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1296 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1297 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1301 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1302 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1303 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1305 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1306 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1308 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1309 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1311 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1313 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1314 written to a terminal.
1316 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1317 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1319 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1320 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1321 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1322 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1323 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1324 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1325 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1326 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1327 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1328 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1329 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1331 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1332 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1336 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1337 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1341 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1343 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1344 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1346 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1349 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1353 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1354 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1355 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1356 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1358 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1359 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1361 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1362 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1363 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1365 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1366 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1368 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1369 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1370 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1372 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1373 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1375 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1376 that specify an offset for the first field.
1377 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1379 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1380 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1384 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1385 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1389 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1390 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1392 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1393 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1394 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1395 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1396 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1398 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1399 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1400 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1402 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1403 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1404 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1406 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1407 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1409 ** Changes in behavior
1411 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1412 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1414 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1415 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1417 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1418 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1420 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1421 when outputting to a terminal.
1423 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1427 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1428 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1430 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1431 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1433 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1434 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1435 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1437 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1438 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1440 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1441 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1442 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1444 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1446 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1447 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1448 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1450 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1451 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1454 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1458 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1459 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1461 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1462 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1464 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1465 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1466 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1468 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1469 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1470 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1471 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1473 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1474 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1475 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1476 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1478 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1479 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1481 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1482 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1484 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1485 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1486 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1488 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1489 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1490 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1492 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1493 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1494 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1496 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1497 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1498 character at the 4GiB position.
1499 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1501 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1502 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1504 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1505 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1507 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1508 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1509 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1511 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1512 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1514 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1515 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1516 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1518 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1519 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1521 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1522 when those files are being created or renamed.
1523 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1527 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1528 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1529 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1530 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1532 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1533 on stderr approximately every second.
1535 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1536 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1538 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1539 other than the default newline character.
1541 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1542 a useful setting with high latency links.
1544 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1545 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1547 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1548 and output errors in general.
1550 ** Changes in behavior
1552 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1553 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1554 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1555 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1557 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1558 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1559 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1560 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1561 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1563 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1564 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1566 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1568 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1569 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1571 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1572 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1576 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1577 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1579 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1580 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1582 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1583 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1585 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1586 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1588 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1590 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1591 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1592 documentation are provided.
1595 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1599 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1600 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1602 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1603 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1604 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1605 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1607 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1608 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1609 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1610 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1612 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1613 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1615 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1616 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1618 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1619 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1620 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1621 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1622 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1623 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1624 values are in octal.
1637 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1639 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1640 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1641 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1642 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1643 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1644 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1646 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1647 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1648 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1649 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1651 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1652 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1653 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1655 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1656 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1657 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1658 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1660 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1661 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1662 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1664 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1665 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1666 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1668 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1669 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1670 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1671 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1672 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1674 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1675 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1676 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1678 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1679 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1681 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1682 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1683 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1685 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1686 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1688 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1689 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1691 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1692 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1694 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1695 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1697 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1698 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1699 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1701 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1702 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1706 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1707 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1709 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1710 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1711 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1712 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1713 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1714 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1715 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1716 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1717 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1718 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1719 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1720 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1721 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1722 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1723 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1724 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1725 it suitable for embedded system.
1727 ** Changes in behavior
1729 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1730 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1732 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1733 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1735 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1736 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1737 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1739 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1740 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1741 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1745 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1746 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1747 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1749 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1751 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1752 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1753 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1755 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1756 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1757 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1758 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1760 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1761 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1763 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1764 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1765 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1768 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1772 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
1773 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1774 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1776 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1777 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1778 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1779 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1781 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1782 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1783 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1785 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1786 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1788 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1790 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1791 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1792 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1794 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1795 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1796 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1798 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1799 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1800 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1801 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1803 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1804 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1805 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1807 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1808 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1809 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1811 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1812 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1814 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1815 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1816 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1817 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1819 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1820 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1821 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1823 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1824 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1825 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1829 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1830 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1831 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1833 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1834 used to identify the split points.
1836 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1837 command line argument through to the output.
1839 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1842 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1843 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1845 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1846 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1848 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1850 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1851 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1852 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1854 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1855 unique groups with empty lines.
1857 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1858 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1860 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1863 ** Changes in behavior
1865 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1866 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1867 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1868 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1870 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1871 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1873 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1874 not just the transfer counts.
1876 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1878 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1879 as per the documented interface.
1883 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1885 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1886 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1887 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1888 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1890 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1891 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1892 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1893 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1895 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1896 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1897 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1899 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1900 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1902 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1903 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1905 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1909 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1912 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1916 numfmt: reformat numbers
1920 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1921 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1922 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1924 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1925 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1926 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1928 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1929 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1933 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1934 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1936 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1937 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1938 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1940 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1941 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1942 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1944 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1945 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1946 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1948 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1949 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1950 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1952 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1953 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1954 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1956 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1957 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1959 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1960 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1962 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1963 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1964 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1966 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1967 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1968 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1970 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1971 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1972 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1974 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1975 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1976 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1977 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1979 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1980 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1981 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1983 ** Changes in behavior
1985 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1986 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1987 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1988 'total' in the target column.
1990 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1991 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1992 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1994 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1995 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1997 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1998 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
2002 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
2003 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2005 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
2006 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
2008 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
2012 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
2013 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
2014 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
2015 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
2016 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
2017 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
2018 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
2019 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
2020 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
2021 for a patched distribution package.
2023 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
2024 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2026 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
2027 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
2028 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
2029 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2032 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
2036 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
2038 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
2039 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
2040 sha384sum and sha512sum.
2044 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
2045 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2046 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2047 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2048 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2050 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2051 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2053 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2054 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2055 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2056 eventually exits nonzero.
2058 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2059 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2060 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2061 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2062 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2064 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2065 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2066 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2068 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2069 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2070 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2072 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2073 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2074 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2076 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2077 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2078 Before, this would infloop:
2079 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2080 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2082 ** Changes in behavior
2084 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2088 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2089 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2090 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2091 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2092 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2095 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2096 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2097 format-changing options.
2099 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2100 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2101 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2102 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2103 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2107 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2108 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2109 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2110 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2111 are run without following the instructions in README.
2113 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2114 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2115 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2116 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2117 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2118 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2119 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2122 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2126 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2127 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2128 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2129 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2131 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2132 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2133 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2136 sort -u could read freed memory.
2137 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2138 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2139 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2143 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2144 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2145 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2146 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2149 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2153 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2154 processes will not intersperse their output.
2155 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2157 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2158 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2159 date: invalid date '\260'
2160 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2162 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2163 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2164 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2165 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2167 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2168 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2169 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2171 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2172 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2173 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2174 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2175 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2176 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2178 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2179 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2181 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2182 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2184 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2185 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2186 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2188 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2189 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2190 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2194 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2196 ** Changes in behavior
2198 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2199 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2200 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2201 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2202 have any reason to include it here.
2206 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2207 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2208 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2210 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2211 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2212 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2215 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2219 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2220 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2221 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2222 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2223 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2224 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2226 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2227 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2228 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2229 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2230 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2231 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2232 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2234 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2235 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2237 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2238 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2242 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2243 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2245 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2247 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2249 ** Changes in behavior
2251 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2252 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2253 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2255 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2256 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2259 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2263 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2264 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2265 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2266 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2267 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2268 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2269 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2270 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2272 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2273 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2274 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2275 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2276 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2278 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2279 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2281 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2282 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2284 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2285 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2287 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2288 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2290 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2291 additional static suffix to output file names.
2293 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2294 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2295 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2297 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2298 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2302 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2303 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2304 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2306 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2307 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2308 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2309 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2310 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2311 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2313 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2314 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2315 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2316 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2317 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2319 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2320 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2321 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2322 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2326 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2327 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2328 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2330 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2331 instead of causing a usage failure.
2333 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2336 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2340 realpath: print resolved file names.
2344 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2345 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2347 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2348 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2350 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2351 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2352 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2353 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2354 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2355 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2357 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2358 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2359 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2361 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2362 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2363 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2365 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2366 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2367 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2368 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2369 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2371 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2373 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2374 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2376 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2377 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2378 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2380 ** Changes in behavior
2382 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2383 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2384 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2385 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2386 usually-short referent instead.
2388 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2389 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2390 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2391 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2394 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2398 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2399 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2400 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2402 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2403 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2405 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2406 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2410 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2411 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2413 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2414 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2415 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2416 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2418 ** Changes in behavior
2420 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2421 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2422 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2426 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2427 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2428 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2431 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2435 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2436 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2437 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2439 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2440 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2442 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2443 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2444 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2445 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2446 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2448 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2449 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2450 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2451 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2452 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2453 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2454 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2455 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2457 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2458 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2460 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2461 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2463 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2464 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2466 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2467 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2468 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2470 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2471 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2472 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2473 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2475 ** Changes in behavior
2477 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2478 when -v or -c specified.
2480 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2481 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2485 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2486 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2487 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2488 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2489 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2491 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2492 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2493 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2495 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2496 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2497 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2498 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2499 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2500 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2501 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2503 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2504 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2505 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2509 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2510 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2512 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2515 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2516 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2518 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2519 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2521 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2522 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2524 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2526 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2530 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2531 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2533 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2536 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2540 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2541 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2543 ** Changes in behavior
2545 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2546 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2547 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2548 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2549 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2550 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2551 resolved for 2.6.39.
2552 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2553 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2554 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2558 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2561 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2565 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2566 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2567 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2569 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2570 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2571 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2573 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2574 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2575 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2577 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2578 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2580 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2581 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2583 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2584 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2586 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2587 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2591 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2592 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2593 processed portion thereof.
2595 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2596 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2598 ** Changes in behavior
2600 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2601 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2602 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2604 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2605 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2606 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2608 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2609 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2611 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2612 Use --preserve-context instead.
2614 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2617 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2621 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2622 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2623 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2624 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2625 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2627 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2628 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2630 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2631 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2632 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2634 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2635 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2637 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2638 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2642 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2643 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2644 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2645 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2646 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2647 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2648 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2649 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2651 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2652 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2653 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2655 ** Changes in behavior
2657 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2658 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2659 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2662 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2666 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2667 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2668 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2671 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2675 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2676 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2678 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2679 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2681 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2682 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2684 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2685 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2686 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2687 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2689 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2690 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2692 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2693 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2694 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2696 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2698 ** Changes in behavior
2700 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2701 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2702 to the number of available processors.
2706 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2707 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2708 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2711 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2715 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2716 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2717 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2718 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2720 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2721 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2722 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2724 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2725 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2727 ** Changes in behavior
2729 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2730 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2732 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2733 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2734 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2735 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2736 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2737 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2739 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2740 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2741 the same way as the others.
2743 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2744 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2747 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2751 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2752 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2753 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2755 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2756 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2758 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2759 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2760 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2762 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2763 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2765 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2766 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2768 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2769 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2770 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2772 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2773 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2774 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2775 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2779 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2780 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2782 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2785 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2786 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2788 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2790 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2791 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2792 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2794 ** Changes in behavior
2796 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2797 rather than its aliased target.
2799 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2800 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2801 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2803 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2804 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2805 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2806 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2807 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2808 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2809 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2810 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2812 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2814 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2816 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2817 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2820 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2821 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2822 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2823 control like taskset for example.
2825 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2827 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2828 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2829 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2830 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2831 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2832 includes %C when context information is available.
2834 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2835 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2836 rather than a file system attribute.
2838 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2839 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2840 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2841 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2843 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2844 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2845 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2847 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2848 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2849 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2852 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2856 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2857 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2859 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2861 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2862 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2864 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2865 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2866 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2867 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2869 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2870 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2871 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2875 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2876 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2878 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2879 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2880 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2882 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2883 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2884 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2885 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2886 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2887 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2888 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2889 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2890 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2892 ** Changes in behavior
2894 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2895 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2897 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2898 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2901 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2905 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2906 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2907 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2908 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2912 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2913 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2915 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2916 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2917 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2918 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2920 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2921 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2922 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2925 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2929 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2930 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2931 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2933 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2934 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2935 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2937 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2938 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2940 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2941 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2942 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2943 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2945 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2946 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2947 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2949 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2950 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2951 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2952 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2954 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2955 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2956 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2958 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2959 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2960 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2961 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2963 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2964 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2965 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2967 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2968 processes will not intersperse their output.
2969 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2972 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2976 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2977 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2979 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2980 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2982 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2983 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2984 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2985 the presence of the empty string argument.
2986 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2988 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2989 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2990 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2991 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2993 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2994 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2996 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2997 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2998 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3000 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
3001 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
3002 and with a malicious user on the same system
3003 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
3004 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
3007 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
3011 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
3012 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
3013 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3015 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
3016 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
3017 offending directory and all "contents."
3019 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
3020 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
3021 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
3023 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
3024 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
3025 without capabilities were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3027 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
3028 processes will not intersperse their output.
3029 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3030 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3032 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
3033 output the name of the file to stdout.
3034 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3036 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
3037 call fails with errno == EACCES.
3038 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3040 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
3041 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
3044 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
3045 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3046 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3048 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3049 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3050 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3051 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3052 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3053 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3055 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3056 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3057 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3058 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3060 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3061 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3063 ** Changes in behavior
3065 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3066 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3067 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3068 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3069 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3071 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3072 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3073 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3074 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3076 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3078 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3079 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3080 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3081 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3082 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3086 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3090 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3091 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3093 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3094 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3096 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3097 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3098 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3100 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3101 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3104 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3108 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3109 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3110 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3112 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3113 to accommodate leap seconds.
3114 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3116 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3117 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3118 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3120 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3122 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3123 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3124 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3126 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3127 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3128 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3129 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3130 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3134 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3135 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3136 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3137 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3139 ** Changes in behavior
3141 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3142 environment variable is set.
3144 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3145 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3146 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3150 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3151 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3152 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3153 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3155 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3156 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3157 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3158 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3162 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3163 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3164 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3166 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3167 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3168 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3169 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3170 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3171 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3172 another improvement:
3174 rm -r is now slightly more standard-conforming when operating on
3175 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3178 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3182 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3183 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3184 and libraries tested at configure time.
3185 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3187 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3188 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3190 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3191 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3193 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3194 printing a summary to stderr.
3195 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3197 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3198 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3199 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3201 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3202 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3204 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3205 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3206 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3207 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3209 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3210 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3211 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3212 which is relatively unusual.
3213 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3215 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3216 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3217 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3218 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3219 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3220 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3221 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3225 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3226 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3227 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3228 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3229 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3233 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3234 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3236 ** Changes in behavior
3238 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3239 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3240 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3241 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3242 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3245 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3249 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3250 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3252 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3253 before data copying has started.
3255 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3256 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3258 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3259 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3260 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3261 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3263 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3264 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3265 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3266 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3268 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3273 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3274 for its standard streams.
3276 ** Changes in behavior
3278 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3279 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3280 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3281 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3282 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3283 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3285 ** Deprecated options
3287 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3288 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3292 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3294 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3295 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3296 a btrfs file system.
3298 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3300 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3301 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3303 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3304 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3307 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3311 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3312 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3313 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3314 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3316 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3317 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3318 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3319 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3320 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3325 make check: two tests have been corrected
3329 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3330 inherited from gnulib.
3333 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3337 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3338 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3339 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3340 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3342 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3343 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3345 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3347 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3348 systems without xattr support.
3350 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3351 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3352 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3354 ** Changes in behavior
3356 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3357 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3358 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3359 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3361 ** Improved robustness
3363 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3364 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3365 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3366 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3367 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3368 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3369 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3370 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3371 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3375 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3376 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3378 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3379 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3380 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3381 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3382 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3385 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3389 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3390 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3391 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3395 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3396 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3397 data was read, or on process exit.
3398 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3400 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3401 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3402 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3403 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3405 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3406 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3407 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3408 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3410 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3411 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3413 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3414 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3416 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3417 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3418 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3420 ** Changes in behavior
3422 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3423 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3424 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3426 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3427 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3429 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3430 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3431 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3434 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3438 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3440 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3441 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3442 install: Never copies xattrs
3444 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3445 from overwriting any existing destination file
3447 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3448 mode where this feature is available.
3450 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3451 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3452 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3453 do not modify the destination at all.
3455 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3457 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3461 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3462 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3464 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3466 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3467 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3469 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3470 processing the first file name
3472 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3473 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3474 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3475 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3477 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3478 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3480 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3481 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3484 ** Changes in behavior
3486 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3487 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3489 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3490 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3491 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3493 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3494 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3496 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3498 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3499 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3500 is still marked with a '+'.
3503 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3507 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3508 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3512 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3513 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3514 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3515 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3516 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3517 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3519 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3520 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3522 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3523 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3525 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3527 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3528 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3529 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3531 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3532 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3534 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3535 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3536 used to factor large numbers.
3538 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3541 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3543 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3545 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3546 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3548 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3549 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3550 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3551 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3553 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3554 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3555 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3557 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3558 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3562 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3564 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3565 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3567 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3568 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3570 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3572 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3573 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3577 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3578 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3579 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3581 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3583 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3584 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3585 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3587 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3588 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3589 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3591 ** Changes in behavior
3593 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3594 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3597 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3601 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3602 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3603 'futimens' system calls.
3607 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3609 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3610 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3611 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3613 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3614 with no USERNAME argument.
3616 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3617 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3618 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3620 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3621 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3622 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3623 number of fields for some inputs.
3625 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3626 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3628 ** Changes in behavior
3630 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3631 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3634 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3638 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3640 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3641 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3642 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3643 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3645 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3646 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3648 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3649 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3651 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3652 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3654 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3655 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3656 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3657 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3659 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3660 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3661 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3662 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3663 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3664 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3666 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3667 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3669 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3670 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3671 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3673 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3674 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3676 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3677 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3679 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3680 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3681 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3682 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3684 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3685 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3687 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3688 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3690 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3691 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3692 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3696 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3697 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3699 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3700 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3701 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3702 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3706 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3707 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3709 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3711 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3715 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3716 which have negative errno values.
3720 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3724 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3728 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3729 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3732 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3736 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3737 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3738 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3740 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3741 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3742 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3743 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3747 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3748 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3749 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3750 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3753 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3757 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3759 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3760 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3761 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3764 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3768 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3769 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3771 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3773 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3775 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3777 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3781 ** Changes in behavior
3783 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3784 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3786 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3787 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3789 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3790 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3791 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3795 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3796 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3797 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3798 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3799 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3800 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3801 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3802 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3803 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3804 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3805 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3807 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3808 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3809 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3812 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3815 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3816 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3817 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3819 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3820 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3821 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3824 ** New build options
3826 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3827 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3828 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3829 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3831 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3832 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3833 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3834 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3835 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3836 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3837 of "make check" fail.
3839 ** Remove deprecated options
3841 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3842 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3843 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3844 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3845 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3847 ** Improved robustness
3849 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3850 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3851 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3852 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3853 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3854 loss of the contents of a/f.
3856 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3857 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3861 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3862 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3863 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3865 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3866 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3867 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3868 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3870 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3871 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3872 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3873 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3874 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3875 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3876 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3877 destination is a symlink.
3879 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3881 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3882 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3884 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3885 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3887 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3889 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3890 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3892 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3893 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3895 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3898 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3899 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3901 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3902 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3904 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3905 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3906 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3907 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3909 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3910 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3911 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3913 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3914 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3915 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3917 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3918 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3919 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3920 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3922 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3923 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3924 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3926 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3927 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3929 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3930 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3932 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3934 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3935 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3936 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3938 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3939 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3941 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3942 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3944 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3945 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3947 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3948 [present in the original version]
3951 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3955 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3957 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3958 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3959 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3961 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3962 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3964 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3968 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3969 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3971 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3972 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3974 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3975 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3977 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3978 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3979 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3980 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3981 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3982 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3984 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3985 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3988 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3989 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3991 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3994 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3995 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3996 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3998 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3999 directory is unreadable.
4001 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
4002 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
4003 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
4005 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
4006 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
4007 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
4008 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
4009 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
4012 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
4013 Before it would print nothing.
4015 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
4017 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
4018 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
4019 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
4020 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
4021 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
4022 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
4023 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
4024 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
4026 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
4030 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
4031 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
4032 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
4034 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
4035 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
4036 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
4037 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
4040 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
4044 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
4045 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4046 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4047 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4048 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4049 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4050 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4052 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4053 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4054 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4055 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4056 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4057 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4058 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4059 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4061 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4062 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4063 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4066 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4070 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4071 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4073 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4074 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4075 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4077 ** Improved robustness
4079 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4080 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4081 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4084 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4088 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4089 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4090 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4091 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4092 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4094 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4098 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4101 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4105 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4106 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4107 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4108 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4110 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4111 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4113 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4114 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4115 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4118 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4120 ** Improved robustness
4122 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4123 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4125 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4126 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4127 or NFS-mounted partition.
4129 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4130 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4134 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4135 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4136 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4137 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4138 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4139 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4141 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4142 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4144 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4145 or neglect to report file removal.
4147 For the "groups" command:
4149 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4150 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4152 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4154 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4156 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4160 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4161 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4164 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4166 ** Changes in behavior
4168 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4169 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4170 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4171 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4173 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4174 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4175 a final './' or '../' component.
4177 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4178 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4179 this only for pipes.
4181 ** Infrastructure changes
4183 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4184 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4185 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4186 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4190 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4191 name is "." or "..".
4193 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4194 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4195 dirent.d_type support.
4197 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4198 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4200 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4201 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4202 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4203 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4206 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4208 ** Changes in behavior
4210 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4214 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4215 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4219 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4220 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4221 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4223 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4224 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4226 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4227 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4229 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4231 ** Improved robustness
4233 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4234 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4235 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4237 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4238 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4241 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4242 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4244 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4245 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4247 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4248 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4250 ** Changes in behavior
4252 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4253 where the two are distinct.
4255 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4256 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4257 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4258 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4259 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4260 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4261 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4262 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4263 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4264 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4265 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4266 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4267 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4268 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4269 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4270 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4271 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4273 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4274 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4275 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4277 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4278 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4279 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4280 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4283 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4284 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4288 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4289 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4290 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4291 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4293 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4294 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4295 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4297 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4298 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4299 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4300 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4301 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4304 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4305 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4307 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4308 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4309 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4310 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4312 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4313 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4314 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4316 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4317 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4318 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4319 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4321 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4322 and sticky) with the -m option.
4324 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4325 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4326 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4327 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4328 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4330 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4331 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4333 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4337 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4338 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4339 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4340 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4342 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4344 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4346 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4347 silently ignoring one of them.
4349 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4350 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4351 containing this change was 5.92.
4353 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4354 automatically newline terminated.
4356 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4357 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4358 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4359 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4362 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4363 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4364 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4367 ** Scheduled for removal
4369 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4370 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4372 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4373 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4374 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4375 command to unlink a directory.
4377 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4378 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4379 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4380 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4384 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4385 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4386 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4387 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4388 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4389 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4393 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4394 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4396 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4398 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4399 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4400 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4402 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4403 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4406 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4407 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4409 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4410 list directories before files.
4412 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4413 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4414 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4415 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4418 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4420 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4422 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4423 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4424 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4426 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4427 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4431 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4432 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4433 usually printing nothing.
4435 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4437 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4438 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4439 them with hard-linked directories.
4441 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4442 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4443 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4445 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4446 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4447 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4449 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4452 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4453 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4455 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4456 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4458 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4459 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4461 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4462 all command-line arguments.
4464 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4466 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4468 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4469 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4471 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4473 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4474 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4475 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4476 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4477 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4479 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4480 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4482 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4483 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4484 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4485 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4487 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4489 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4493 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4494 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4496 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4497 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4499 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4500 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4502 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4503 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4505 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4506 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4508 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4510 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4511 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4512 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4515 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4517 ** Build-related bug fixes
4519 installing .mo files would fail
4522 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4526 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4528 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4531 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4535 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4536 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4540 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4542 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4543 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4545 ** Deprecated options
4547 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4548 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4550 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4554 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4556 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4557 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4558 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4559 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4561 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4564 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4570 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4575 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4577 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4579 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4580 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4581 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4583 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4584 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4585 problematic usages. These include:
4587 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4588 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4589 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4590 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4591 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4592 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4593 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4594 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4595 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4597 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4598 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4600 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4601 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4602 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4603 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4605 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4606 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4607 between binary and text files.
4609 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4613 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4617 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4618 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4620 head tac tail tee tr
4621 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4623 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4624 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4626 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4627 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4628 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4630 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4632 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4634 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4635 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4636 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4640 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4642 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4643 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4645 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4646 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4647 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4651 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4652 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4656 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4657 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4658 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4662 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4663 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4667 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4669 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4671 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4675 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4676 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4677 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4679 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4680 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4681 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4682 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4683 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4685 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4689 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4690 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4691 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4693 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4695 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4696 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4697 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4698 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4700 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4702 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4703 rather than silently wrapping around.
4705 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4706 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4708 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4709 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4711 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4712 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4713 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4714 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4716 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4718 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4720 ** Improved robustness
4722 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4723 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4724 no matter how large the result.
4726 ** Improved portability
4728 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4729 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4731 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4733 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4734 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4735 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4737 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4738 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4742 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4743 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4745 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4747 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4748 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4749 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4750 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4752 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4753 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4755 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4756 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4757 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4759 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4761 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4762 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4764 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4765 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4767 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4769 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4770 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4772 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4773 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4775 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4776 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4777 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4779 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4781 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4783 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4787 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4789 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4790 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4791 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4793 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4794 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4796 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4797 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4798 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4800 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4801 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4803 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4804 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4805 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4806 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4808 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4809 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4811 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4812 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4813 the file system does not support it.
4815 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4817 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4818 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4820 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4822 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4823 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4825 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4826 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4827 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4828 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4830 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4831 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4834 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4835 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4836 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4837 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4839 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4840 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4841 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4842 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4844 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4845 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4847 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4849 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4850 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4851 reporting incorrect results.
4855 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4856 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4858 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4861 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4863 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4864 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4866 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4867 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4869 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4872 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4873 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4874 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4875 the file name does not look like a page range.
4877 printf has several changes:
4879 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4880 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4882 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4883 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4884 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4886 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4887 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4890 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4891 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4893 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4894 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4896 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4898 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4899 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4901 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4903 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4905 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4906 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4907 when first encountering the directory.
4911 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4912 output; POSIX requires this.
4914 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4915 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4917 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4919 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4920 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4922 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4923 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4925 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4926 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4927 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4928 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4929 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4930 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4931 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4933 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4934 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4935 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4937 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4938 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4940 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4942 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4944 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4945 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4946 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4947 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4949 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4953 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4954 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4955 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4956 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4957 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4959 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4960 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4961 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4963 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4964 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4966 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4967 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4969 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4970 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4971 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4972 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4973 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4975 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4976 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4978 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4979 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4981 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4983 nocreat do not create the output file
4984 excl fail if the output file already exists
4985 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4986 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4988 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4990 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4991 direct use direct I/O for data
4992 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4993 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4994 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4995 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4996 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4998 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
5000 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
5001 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
5004 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
5005 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
5006 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
5007 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
5008 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
5009 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
5011 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
5012 list of NUL-terminated file names.
5014 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
5017 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
5019 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
5021 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
5022 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
5024 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
5025 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
5026 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
5028 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
5029 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
5030 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
5032 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
5034 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
5035 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
5037 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
5038 for compatibility with bash.
5040 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
5042 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
5043 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
5044 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
5045 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5047 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5048 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5050 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5051 ls supports TABSIZE.
5052 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5053 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5054 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5056 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5059 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5061 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5062 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5063 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5064 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5065 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5066 an offset, not as a file name.
5068 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5069 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5071 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5072 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5074 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5075 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5077 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5078 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5079 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5081 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5082 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5084 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5085 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5089 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5091 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5093 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5097 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5098 or more arguments between partitions.
5100 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5101 holes in the destination.
5103 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5104 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5105 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5106 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5107 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5108 terminates immediately.
5110 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5112 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5114 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5115 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5116 not the empty string.
5118 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5119 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5123 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5124 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5125 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5128 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5135 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5139 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5140 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5142 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5143 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5145 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5146 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5147 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5150 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5154 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5155 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5157 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5158 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5160 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5161 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5162 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5164 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5166 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5169 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5171 ** Configuration option
5173 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5174 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5178 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5179 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5183 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5184 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5185 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5188 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5189 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5190 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5191 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5192 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5193 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5194 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5197 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5201 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5202 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5203 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5205 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5206 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5208 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5210 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5211 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5212 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5213 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5215 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5217 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5218 not just the ones that reference directories
5220 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5221 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5223 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5224 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5225 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5227 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5228 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5229 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5230 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5231 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5232 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5234 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5239 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5240 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5242 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5244 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5246 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5248 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5249 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5251 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5252 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5254 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5256 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5260 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5262 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5264 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5265 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5266 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5267 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5268 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5270 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5271 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5273 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5274 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5276 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5277 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5279 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5280 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5281 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5285 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5286 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5287 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5288 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5289 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5290 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5291 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5292 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5293 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5294 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5295 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5296 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5297 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5298 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5300 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5302 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5303 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5305 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5307 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5309 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5310 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5312 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5314 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5315 without a trailing newline.
5317 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5318 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5320 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5323 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5327 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5329 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5331 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5332 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5333 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5334 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5336 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5338 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5339 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5340 be printed without leading spaces.
5342 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5343 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5348 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5349 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5350 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5352 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5354 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5355 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5357 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5358 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5360 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5361 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5363 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5365 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5367 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5369 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5370 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5372 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5374 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5376 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5377 byte offsets are specified.
5380 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5383 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5386 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5387 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5388 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5389 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5390 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5391 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5392 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5393 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5394 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5395 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5396 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5397 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5398 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5399 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5400 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5401 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5402 directory where M has write access.
5403 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5404 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5405 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5408 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5409 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5410 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5411 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5412 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5413 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5414 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5415 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5416 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5417 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5418 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5419 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5420 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5421 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5422 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5423 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5424 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5425 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5426 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5427 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5428 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5429 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5430 appeared one additional time.
5432 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5433 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5434 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5435 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5438 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5439 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5440 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5441 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5442 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5443 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5444 if there were more than 338.
5446 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5447 - false --help now exits nonzero
5450 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5451 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5452 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5453 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5456 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5457 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5458 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5459 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5460 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5463 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5464 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5465 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5466 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5467 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5468 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5469 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5472 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5473 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5474 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5475 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5476 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5477 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5479 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5480 under certain unusual conditions
5481 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5482 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5485 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5486 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5487 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5488 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5489 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5490 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5491 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5492 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5493 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5494 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5495 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5496 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5497 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5498 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5499 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5500 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5503 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5504 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5507 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5508 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5509 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5510 involving hard-linked directories
5511 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5512 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5513 character-special and block files
5516 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5517 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5518 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5519 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5520 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5521 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5522 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5523 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5524 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5526 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5527 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5528 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5529 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5530 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5531 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5532 specified on the command line.
5533 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5534 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5535 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5536 the first file untouched.
5537 * readlink: new program
5538 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5539 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5540 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5541 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5542 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5543 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5546 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5547 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5548 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5549 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5550 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5551 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5552 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5553 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5554 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5555 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5556 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5557 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5559 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5560 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5561 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5563 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5564 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5565 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5566 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5567 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5568 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5569 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5570 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5573 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5574 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5577 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5578 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5579 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5580 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5581 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5582 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5583 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5586 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5587 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5589 ========================================================================
5590 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5591 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5594 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5596 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5597 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5598 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5599 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5600 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5601 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5602 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5603 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5604 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5605 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5606 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5607 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5609 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5610 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5611 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5612 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5614 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5617 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5619 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5620 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5621 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5622 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5623 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5624 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5625 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5628 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5629 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5630 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5631 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5632 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5633 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5634 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5635 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5636 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5637 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5638 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5639 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5640 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5641 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5642 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5643 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5645 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5646 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5648 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5649 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5650 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5651 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5652 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5653 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5655 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5656 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5657 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5658 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5659 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5660 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5661 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5663 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5664 the source files in the following example:
5665 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5666 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5667 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5668 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5669 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5670 links between source files with --preserve=links
5671 * cp accepts new options:
5672 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5673 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5674 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5675 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5676 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5677 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5678 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5679 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5680 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5682 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5683 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5684 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5685 even though it's older than dest.
5686 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5687 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5688 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5689 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5690 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5692 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5693 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5694 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5695 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5696 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5697 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5698 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5700 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5701 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5702 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5704 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5705 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5706 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5707 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5708 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5709 This is the default.
5711 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5712 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5713 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5714 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5715 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5717 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5720 ========================================================================
5721 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5722 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5725 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5726 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5728 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5729 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5730 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5731 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5732 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5734 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5735 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5736 that specifies a non-directory
5739 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5740 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5741 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5742 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5743 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5744 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5745 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5746 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5747 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5748 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5749 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5750 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5751 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5752 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5753 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5754 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5755 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5756 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5757 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5758 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5759 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5760 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5761 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5762 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5764 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5765 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5766 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5768 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5770 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5771 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5773 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5774 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5775 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5776 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5777 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5779 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5780 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5781 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5782 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5783 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5785 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5787 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5788 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5789 * still more portability fixes
5790 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5791 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5793 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5795 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5797 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5799 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5800 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5801 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5802 there is any time remaining
5803 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5805 ========================================================================
5806 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5807 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5809 This package began as the union of the following:
5810 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5812 ========================================================================
5814 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5816 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5817 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5818 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5819 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5820 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5821 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.