1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 numfmt: reformat numbers
11 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
12 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
13 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
15 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
16 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
17 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
21 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
24 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
25 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
28 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
29 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
30 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
32 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
33 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
34 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
36 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
37 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
38 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
40 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
41 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
42 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
44 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
47 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
48 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
50 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
51 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
52 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
54 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
55 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
56 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
58 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
59 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
60 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
62 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
63 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
64 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
65 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
67 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
68 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
69 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
71 ** Changes in behavior
73 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
74 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
75 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
76 'total' in the target column.
78 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
79 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
80 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
82 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
83 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
87 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
88 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
90 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
91 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
93 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
97 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
98 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
99 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
100 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
101 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
102 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
103 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
104 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
105 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
106 for a patched distribution package.
108 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
109 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
111 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
112 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
113 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
114 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
117 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
121 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
123 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
124 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
125 sha384sum and sha512sum.
129 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
130 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
131 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
132 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
133 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
135 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
136 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
138 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
139 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
140 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
141 eventually exits nonzero.
143 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
144 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
145 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
146 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
147 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
149 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
150 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
151 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
153 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
154 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
155 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
157 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
158 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
161 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
162 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
163 Before, this would infloop:
164 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
165 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
167 ** Changes in behavior
169 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
173 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
174 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
175 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
176 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
177 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
180 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
181 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
182 format-changing options.
184 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
185 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
186 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
187 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
188 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
192 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
193 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
194 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
195 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
196 are run without following the instructions in README.
198 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
199 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
200 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
201 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
202 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
203 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
204 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
211 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
212 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
213 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
214 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
216 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
217 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
218 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
219 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
221 sort -u could read freed memory.
222 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
223 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
224 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
228 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
229 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
230 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
231 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
234 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
238 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
239 processes will not intersperse their output.
240 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
242 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
243 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
244 date: invalid date '\260'
245 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
247 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
248 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
249 lines output by df, can work reliably.
250 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
252 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
253 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
254 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
256 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
257 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
258 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
259 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
260 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
261 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
263 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
264 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
266 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
267 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
269 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
270 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
271 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
273 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
274 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
275 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
279 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
281 ** Changes in behavior
283 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
284 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
285 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
286 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
287 have any reason to include it here.
291 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
292 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
293 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
295 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
296 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
297 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
300 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
304 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
305 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
306 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
307 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
308 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
309 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
311 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
312 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
313 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
314 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
315 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
316 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
317 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
319 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
320 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
322 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
323 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
327 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
328 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
330 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
332 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
334 ** Changes in behavior
336 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
337 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
338 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
340 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
341 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
344 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
348 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
349 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
350 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
351 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
352 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
353 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
354 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
355 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
357 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
358 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
359 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
360 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
361 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
363 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
364 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
366 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
367 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
369 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
370 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
372 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
373 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
375 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
376 additional static suffix to output file names.
378 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
379 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
380 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
382 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
383 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
387 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
388 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
389 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
391 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
392 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
393 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
394 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
395 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
396 typically still point to one of the hard links.
398 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
399 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
400 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
401 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
402 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
404 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
405 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
406 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
407 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
411 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
412 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
413 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
415 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
416 instead of causing a usage failure.
418 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
421 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
425 realpath: print resolved file names.
429 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
430 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
432 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
433 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
435 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
436 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
437 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
438 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
439 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
442 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
443 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
444 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
446 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
447 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
450 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
451 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
452 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
453 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
454 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
456 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
458 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
461 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
462 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
463 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
465 ** Changes in behavior
467 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
468 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
469 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
470 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
471 usually-short referent instead.
473 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
474 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
475 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
476 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
479 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
483 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
484 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
485 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
487 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
488 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
490 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
491 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
495 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
496 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
498 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
499 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
500 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
501 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
503 ** Changes in behavior
505 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
506 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
507 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
511 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
512 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
513 only .tar.xz files is enough.
516 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
520 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
521 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
522 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
524 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
525 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
527 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
528 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
529 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
530 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
531 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
533 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
534 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
535 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
536 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
537 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
538 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
539 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
540 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
542 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
543 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
545 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
546 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
548 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
549 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
551 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
552 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
553 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
555 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
556 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
557 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
558 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
560 ** Changes in behavior
562 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
563 when -v or -c specified.
565 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
566 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
570 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
571 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
572 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
573 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
574 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
576 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
577 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
578 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
580 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
581 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
582 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
583 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
584 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
585 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
586 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
588 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
589 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
590 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
594 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
595 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
597 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
600 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
601 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
603 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
604 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
606 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
607 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
609 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
611 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
615 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
616 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
618 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
621 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
625 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
626 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
628 ** Changes in behavior
630 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
631 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
632 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
633 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
634 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
635 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
637 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
638 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
639 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
643 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
646 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
650 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
651 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
652 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
654 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
655 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
656 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
658 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
659 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
660 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
662 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
663 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
665 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
666 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
668 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
669 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
671 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
672 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
676 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
677 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
678 processed portion thereof.
680 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
681 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
683 ** Changes in behavior
685 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
686 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
687 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
689 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
690 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
691 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
693 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
694 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
696 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
697 Use --preserve-context instead.
699 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
702 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
706 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
707 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
708 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
709 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
712 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
713 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
715 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
716 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
717 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
719 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
720 reject file names invalid for that file system.
722 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
723 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
727 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
728 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
729 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
730 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
731 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
732 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
733 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
734 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
736 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
737 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
738 the same number of fields are output for each line.
740 ** Changes in behavior
742 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
743 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
744 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
747 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
751 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
752 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
753 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
756 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
760 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
761 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
763 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
764 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
766 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
767 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
769 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
770 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
771 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
772 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
774 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
775 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
777 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
778 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
779 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
781 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
783 ** Changes in behavior
785 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
786 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
787 to the number of available processors.
791 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
794 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
798 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
799 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
800 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
801 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
803 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
804 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
805 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
807 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
808 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
810 ** Changes in behavior
812 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
813 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
815 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
816 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
817 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
818 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
819 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
820 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
822 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
823 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
824 the same way as the others.
827 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
831 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
832 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
833 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
835 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
836 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
838 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
839 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
840 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
842 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
843 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
845 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
846 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
848 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
849 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
850 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
852 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
853 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
854 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
855 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
859 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
860 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
862 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
865 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
866 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
868 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
870 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
871 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
872 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
874 ** Changes in behavior
876 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
877 rather than its aliased target.
879 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
880 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
881 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
883 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
884 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
885 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
886 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
887 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
888 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
889 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
890 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
892 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
894 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
896 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
897 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
900 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
901 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
902 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
903 control like taskset for example.
905 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
907 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
908 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
909 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
910 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
911 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
912 includes %C when context information is available.
914 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
915 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
916 rather than a file system attribute.
918 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
919 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
920 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
921 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
923 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
924 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
925 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
927 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
928 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
929 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
932 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
936 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
937 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
939 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
941 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
942 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
944 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
945 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
946 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
947 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
949 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
950 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
951 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
955 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
956 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
958 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
959 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
960 duration after the initial signal was sent.
962 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
963 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
964 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
965 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
966 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
967 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
968 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
969 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
970 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
972 ** Changes in behavior
974 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
975 sequence when it would be a no-op.
977 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
978 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
981 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
985 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
986 of available processors, which may not have been the case
987 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
988 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
992 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
993 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
995 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
996 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
997 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
998 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1000 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1001 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1002 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1005 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1009 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1010 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1013 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1014 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1015 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1017 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1018 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1020 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1021 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1022 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1023 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1025 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1026 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1027 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1029 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1030 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1031 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1032 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1034 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1035 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1036 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1038 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1039 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1040 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1041 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1043 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1044 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1045 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1047 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1048 processes will not intersperse their output.
1049 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1052 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1056 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1057 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1059 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1060 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1062 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1063 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1064 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1065 the presence of the empty string argument.
1066 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1068 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1069 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1070 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1071 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1073 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1074 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1076 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1077 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1078 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1080 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1081 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1082 and with a malicious user on the same system
1083 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1087 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1091 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1092 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1093 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1095 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1096 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1097 offending directory and all "contents."
1099 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1100 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1101 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1103 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1104 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1105 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1107 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1108 processes will not intersperse their output.
1109 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1110 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1112 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1113 output the name of the file to stdout.
1114 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1116 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1117 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1118 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1120 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1121 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1124 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1125 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1126 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1128 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1129 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1130 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1131 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1132 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1133 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1135 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1136 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1137 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1138 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1140 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1141 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1143 ** Changes in behavior
1145 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1146 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1147 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1148 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1149 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1151 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1152 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1153 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1154 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1156 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1158 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1159 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1160 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1161 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1162 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1166 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1170 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1171 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1173 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1174 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1176 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1177 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1178 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1180 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1181 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1184 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1188 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1189 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1190 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1192 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1193 to accommodate leap seconds.
1194 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1196 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1197 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1198 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1200 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1202 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1203 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1204 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1206 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1207 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1208 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1209 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1210 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1214 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1215 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1216 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1217 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1219 ** Changes in behavior
1221 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1222 environment variable is set.
1224 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1225 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1226 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1230 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1231 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1232 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1233 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1235 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1236 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1237 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1238 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1242 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1243 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1244 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1246 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1247 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1248 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1249 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1250 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1251 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1252 another improvement:
1254 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1255 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1258 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1262 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1263 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1264 and libraries tested at configure time.
1265 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1267 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1270 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1271 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1273 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1274 printing a summary to stderr.
1275 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1277 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1278 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1279 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1281 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1282 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1284 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1285 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1286 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1287 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1289 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1290 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1291 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1292 which is relatively unusual.
1293 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1295 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1296 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1297 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1298 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1299 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1300 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1301 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1305 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1306 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1307 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1308 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1309 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1313 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1314 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1316 ** Changes in behavior
1318 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1319 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1320 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1321 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1322 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1325 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1329 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1330 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1332 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1333 before data copying has started.
1335 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1336 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1338 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1339 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1340 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1341 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1343 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1344 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1345 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1346 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1348 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1353 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1354 for its standard streams.
1356 ** Changes in behavior
1358 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1359 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1360 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1361 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1362 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1363 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1365 ** Deprecated options
1367 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1368 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1372 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1374 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1375 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1376 a btrfs file system.
1378 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1380 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1381 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1383 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1384 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1387 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1391 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1392 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1393 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1394 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1396 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1397 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1398 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1399 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1400 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1405 make check: two tests have been corrected
1409 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1410 inherited from gnulib.
1413 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1417 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1418 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1419 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1420 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1422 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1423 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1425 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1427 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1428 systems without xattr support.
1430 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1431 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1432 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1434 ** Changes in behavior
1436 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1437 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1438 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1439 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1441 ** Improved robustness
1443 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1444 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1445 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1446 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1447 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1448 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1449 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1450 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1451 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1455 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1456 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1458 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1459 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1460 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1461 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1462 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1465 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1469 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1470 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1471 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1475 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1476 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1477 data was read, or on process exit.
1478 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1480 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1481 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1482 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1485 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1486 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1487 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1488 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1490 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1491 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1493 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1494 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1496 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1497 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1498 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1500 ** Changes in behavior
1502 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1503 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1504 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1506 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1507 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1509 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1510 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1511 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1514 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1518 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1520 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1521 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1522 install: Never copies xattrs
1524 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1525 from overwriting any existing destination file
1527 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1528 mode where this feature is available.
1530 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1531 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1532 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1533 do not modify the destination at all.
1535 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1537 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1541 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1542 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1544 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1546 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1547 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1549 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1550 processing the first file name
1552 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1553 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1554 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1555 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1557 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1558 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1560 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1561 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1564 ** Changes in behavior
1566 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1567 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1569 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1570 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1571 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1573 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1574 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1576 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1578 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1579 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1580 is still marked with a '+'.
1583 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1587 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1588 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1592 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1593 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1594 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1595 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1596 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1597 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1599 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1600 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1602 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1603 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1605 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1607 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1608 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1609 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1611 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1612 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1614 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1615 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1616 used to factor large numbers.
1618 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1621 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1623 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1625 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1626 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1628 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1629 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1630 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1631 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1633 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1634 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1635 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1637 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1638 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1642 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1644 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1645 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1647 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1648 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1650 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1652 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1653 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1657 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1658 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1659 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1661 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1663 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1664 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1665 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1667 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1668 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1669 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1671 ** Changes in behavior
1673 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1674 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1677 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1681 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1682 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1683 'futimens' system calls.
1687 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1689 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1690 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1691 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1693 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1694 with no USERNAME argument.
1696 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1697 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1698 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1700 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1701 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1702 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1703 number of fields for some inputs.
1705 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1706 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1708 ** Changes in behavior
1710 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1711 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1714 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1718 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1720 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1721 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1722 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1723 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1725 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1726 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1728 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1729 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1731 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1732 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1734 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1735 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1736 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1737 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1739 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1740 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1741 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1742 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1743 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1744 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1746 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1747 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1749 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1750 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1751 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1753 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1754 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1756 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1757 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1759 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1760 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1761 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1762 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1764 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1765 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1767 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1768 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1770 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1771 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1772 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1776 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1777 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1779 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1780 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1781 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1782 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1786 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1787 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1789 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1791 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1795 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1796 which have negative errno values.
1800 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1804 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1808 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1809 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1812 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1816 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1817 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1818 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1820 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1821 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1822 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1823 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1827 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1828 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1829 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1830 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1833 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1837 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1839 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1840 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1841 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1844 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1848 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1849 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1851 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1853 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1855 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1857 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1861 ** Changes in behavior
1863 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1864 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1866 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1867 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1869 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1870 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1871 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1875 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1876 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1877 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1878 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1879 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1880 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1881 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1882 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1883 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1884 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1885 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1887 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1888 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1889 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1892 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1895 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1896 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1897 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1899 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1900 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1901 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1904 ** New build options
1906 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1907 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1908 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1909 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1911 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1912 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1913 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1914 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1915 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1916 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1917 of "make check" fail.
1919 ** Remove deprecated options
1921 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1922 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1923 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1924 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1925 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1927 ** Improved robustness
1929 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1930 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1931 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1932 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1933 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1934 loss of the contents of a/f.
1936 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1937 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1941 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1942 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1943 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1945 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1946 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1947 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1948 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1950 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1951 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1952 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1953 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1954 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1955 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1956 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1957 destination is a symlink.
1959 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1961 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1962 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1964 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1965 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1967 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1969 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1970 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1972 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1973 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1975 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1978 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1979 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1981 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1982 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1984 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1985 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1986 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1987 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1989 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1990 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1991 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1993 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1994 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1995 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1997 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1998 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1999 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2000 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2002 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2003 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2004 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2006 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2007 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2009 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2010 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2012 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2014 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2015 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2016 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2018 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2019 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2021 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2022 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2024 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2025 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2027 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2028 [present in the original version]
2031 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2035 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2037 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2038 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2039 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2041 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2042 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2044 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2048 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2049 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2051 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2052 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2054 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2055 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2057 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2058 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2059 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2060 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2061 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2062 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2064 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2065 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2068 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2069 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2071 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2074 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2075 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2076 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2078 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2079 directory is unreadable.
2081 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2082 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2083 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2085 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2086 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2087 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2088 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2089 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2092 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2093 Before it would print nothing.
2095 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2097 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2098 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2099 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2100 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2101 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2102 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2103 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2104 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2106 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2110 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2111 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2112 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2114 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2115 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2116 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2117 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2120 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2124 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2125 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2126 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2127 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2128 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2129 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2130 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2132 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2133 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2134 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2135 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2136 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2137 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2138 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2139 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2141 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2142 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2143 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2146 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2150 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2151 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2153 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2154 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2155 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2157 ** Improved robustness
2159 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2160 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2161 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2164 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2168 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2169 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2170 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2171 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2172 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2174 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2178 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2181 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2185 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2186 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2187 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2188 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2190 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2191 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2193 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2194 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2195 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2198 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2200 ** Improved robustness
2202 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2203 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2205 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2206 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2207 or NFS-mounted partition.
2209 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2210 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2214 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2215 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2216 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2217 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2218 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2219 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2221 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2222 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2224 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2225 or neglect to report file removal.
2227 For the "groups" command:
2229 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2230 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2232 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2234 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2236 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2240 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2241 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2244 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2246 ** Changes in behavior
2248 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2249 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2250 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2251 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2253 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2254 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2255 a final './' or '../' component.
2257 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2258 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2259 this only for pipes.
2261 ** Infrastructure changes
2263 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2264 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2265 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2266 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2270 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2271 name is "." or "..".
2273 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2274 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2275 dirent.d_type support.
2277 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2278 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2280 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2281 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2282 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2283 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2286 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2288 ** Changes in behavior
2290 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2294 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2295 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2299 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2300 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2301 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2303 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2304 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2306 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2307 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2309 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2311 ** Improved robustness
2313 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2314 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2315 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2317 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2318 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2321 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2322 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2324 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2325 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2327 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2328 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2330 ** Changes in behavior
2332 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2333 where the two are distinct.
2335 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2336 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2337 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2338 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2339 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2340 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2341 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2342 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2343 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2344 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2345 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2346 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2347 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2348 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2349 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2350 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2351 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2353 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2354 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2355 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2357 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2358 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2359 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2360 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2363 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2364 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2368 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2369 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2370 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2371 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2373 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2374 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2375 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2377 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2378 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2379 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2380 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2381 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2384 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2385 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2387 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2388 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2389 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2390 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2392 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2393 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2394 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2396 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2397 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2398 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2399 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2401 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2402 and sticky) with the -m option.
2404 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2405 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2406 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2407 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2408 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2410 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2411 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2413 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2417 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2418 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2419 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2420 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2422 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2424 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2426 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2427 silently ignoring one of them.
2429 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2430 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2431 containing this change was 5.92.
2433 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2434 automatically newline terminated.
2436 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2437 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2438 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2439 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2442 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2443 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2444 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2447 ** Scheduled for removal
2449 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2450 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2452 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2453 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2454 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2455 command to unlink a directory.
2457 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2458 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2459 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2460 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2464 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2465 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2466 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2467 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2468 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2469 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2473 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2474 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2476 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2478 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2479 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2480 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2482 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2483 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2486 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2487 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2489 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2490 list directories before files.
2492 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2493 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2494 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2495 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2498 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2500 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2502 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2503 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2504 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2506 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2507 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2511 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2512 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2513 usually printing nothing.
2515 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2517 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2518 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2519 them with hard-linked directories.
2521 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2522 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2523 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2525 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2526 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2527 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2529 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2532 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2533 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2535 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2536 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2538 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2539 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2541 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2542 all command-line arguments.
2544 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2546 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2548 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2549 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2551 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2553 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2554 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2555 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2556 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2557 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2559 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2560 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2562 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2563 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2564 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2565 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2567 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2569 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2573 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2574 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2576 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2577 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2579 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2580 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2582 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2583 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2585 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2586 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2588 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2590 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2591 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2592 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2595 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2597 ** Build-related bug fixes
2599 installing .mo files would fail
2602 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2606 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2608 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2611 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2615 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2616 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2620 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2622 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2623 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2625 ** Deprecated options
2627 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2628 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2630 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2634 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2636 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2637 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2638 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2639 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2641 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2644 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2650 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2655 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2657 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2659 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2660 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2661 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2663 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2664 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2665 problematic usages. These include:
2667 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2668 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2669 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2670 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2671 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2672 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2673 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2674 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2675 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2677 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2678 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2680 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2681 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2682 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2683 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2685 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2686 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2687 between binary and text files.
2689 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2693 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2697 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2698 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2700 head tac tail tee tr
2701 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2703 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2704 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2706 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2707 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2708 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2710 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2712 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2714 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2715 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2716 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2720 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2722 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2723 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2725 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2726 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2727 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2731 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2732 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2736 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2737 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2738 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2742 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2743 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2747 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2749 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2751 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2755 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2756 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2757 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2759 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2760 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2761 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2762 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2763 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2765 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2769 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2770 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2771 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2773 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2775 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2776 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2777 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2778 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2780 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2782 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2783 rather than silently wrapping around.
2785 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2786 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2788 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2789 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2791 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2792 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2793 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2794 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2796 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2798 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2800 ** Improved robustness
2802 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2803 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2804 no matter how large the result.
2806 ** Improved portability
2808 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2809 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2811 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2813 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2814 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2815 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2817 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2818 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2822 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2823 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2825 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2827 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2828 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2829 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2830 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2832 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2833 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2835 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2836 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2837 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2839 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2841 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2842 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2844 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2845 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2847 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2849 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2850 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2852 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2853 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2855 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2856 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2857 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2859 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2861 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2863 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2867 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2869 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2870 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2871 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2873 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2874 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2876 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2877 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2878 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2880 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2881 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2883 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2884 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2885 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2886 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2888 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2889 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2891 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2892 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2893 the file system does not support it.
2895 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2897 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2898 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2900 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2902 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2903 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2905 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2906 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2907 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2908 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2910 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2911 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2914 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2915 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2916 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2917 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2919 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2920 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2921 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2922 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2924 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2925 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2927 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2929 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2930 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2931 reporting incorrect results.
2935 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2936 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2938 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2941 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2943 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2944 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2946 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2947 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2949 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2952 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2953 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2954 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2955 the file name does not look like a page range.
2957 printf has several changes:
2959 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2960 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2962 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2963 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2964 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2966 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2967 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2970 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2971 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2973 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2974 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2976 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2978 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2979 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2981 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2983 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2985 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2986 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2987 when first encountering the directory.
2991 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2992 output; POSIX requires this.
2994 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2995 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2997 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2999 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3000 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3002 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3003 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3005 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3006 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3007 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3008 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3009 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3010 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3011 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3013 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3014 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3015 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3017 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3018 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3020 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3022 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3024 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3025 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3026 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3027 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3029 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3033 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3034 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3035 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3036 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3037 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3039 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3040 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3041 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3043 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3044 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3046 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3047 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3049 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3050 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3051 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3052 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3053 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3055 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3056 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3058 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3059 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3061 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3063 nocreat do not create the output file
3064 excl fail if the output file already exists
3065 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3066 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3068 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3070 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3071 direct use direct I/O for data
3072 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3073 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3074 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3075 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3076 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3078 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3080 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3081 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3084 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3085 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3086 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3087 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3088 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3089 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3091 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3092 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3094 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3097 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3099 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3101 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3102 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3104 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3105 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3106 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3108 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3109 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3110 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3112 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3114 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3115 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3117 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3118 for compatibility with bash.
3120 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3122 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3123 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3124 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3125 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3127 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3128 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3130 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3131 ls supports TABSIZE.
3132 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3133 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3134 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3136 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3139 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3141 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3142 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3143 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3144 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3145 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3146 an offset, not as a file name.
3148 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3149 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3151 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3152 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3154 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3155 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3157 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3158 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3159 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3161 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3162 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3164 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3165 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3169 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3171 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3173 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3177 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3178 or more arguments between partitions.
3180 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3181 holes in the destination.
3183 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3184 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3185 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3186 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3187 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3188 terminates immediately.
3190 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3192 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3194 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3195 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3196 not the empty string.
3198 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3199 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3203 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3204 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3205 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3208 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3215 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3219 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3220 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3222 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3223 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3225 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3226 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3227 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3230 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3234 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3235 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3237 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3238 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3240 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3241 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3242 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3244 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3246 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3249 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3251 ** Configuration option
3253 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3254 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3258 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3259 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3263 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3264 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3265 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3268 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3269 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3270 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3271 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3272 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3273 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3274 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3277 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3281 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3282 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3283 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3285 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3286 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3288 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3290 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3291 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3292 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3293 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3295 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3297 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3298 not just the ones that reference directories
3300 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3301 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3303 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3304 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3305 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3307 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3308 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3309 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3310 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3311 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3312 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3314 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3319 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3320 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3322 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3324 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3326 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3328 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3329 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3331 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3332 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3334 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3336 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3340 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3342 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3344 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3345 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3346 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3347 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3348 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3350 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3351 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3353 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3354 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3356 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3357 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3359 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3360 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3361 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3365 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3366 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3367 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3368 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3369 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3370 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3371 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3372 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3373 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3374 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3375 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3376 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3377 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3378 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3380 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3382 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3383 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3385 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3387 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3389 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3390 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3392 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3394 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3395 without a trailing newline.
3397 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3398 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3400 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3403 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3407 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3409 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3411 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3412 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3413 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3414 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3416 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3418 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3419 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3420 be printed without leading spaces.
3422 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3423 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3428 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3429 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3430 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3432 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3434 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3435 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3437 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3438 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3440 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3441 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3443 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3445 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3447 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3449 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3450 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3452 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3454 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3456 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3457 byte offsets are specified.
3460 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3463 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3466 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3467 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3468 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3469 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3470 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3471 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3472 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3473 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3474 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3475 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3476 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3477 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3478 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3479 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3480 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3481 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3482 directory where M has write access.
3483 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3484 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3485 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3488 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3489 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3490 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3491 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3492 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3493 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3494 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3495 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3496 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3497 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3498 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3499 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3500 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3501 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3502 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3503 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3504 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3505 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3506 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3507 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3508 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3509 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3510 appeared one additional time.
3512 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3513 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3514 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3515 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3518 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3519 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3520 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3521 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3522 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3523 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3524 if there were more than 338.
3526 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3527 - false --help now exits nonzero
3530 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3531 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3532 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3533 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3536 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3537 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3538 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3539 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3540 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3543 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3544 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3545 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3546 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3547 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3548 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3549 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3552 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3553 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3554 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3555 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3556 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3557 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3559 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3560 under certain unusual conditions
3561 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3562 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3565 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3566 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3567 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3568 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3569 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3570 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3571 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3572 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3573 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3574 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3575 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3576 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3577 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3578 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3579 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3580 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3583 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3584 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3587 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3588 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3589 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3590 involving hard-linked directories
3591 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3592 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3593 character-special and block files
3596 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3597 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3598 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3599 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3600 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3601 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3602 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3603 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3604 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3606 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3607 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3608 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3609 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3610 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3611 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3612 specified on the command line.
3613 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3614 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3615 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3616 the first file untouched.
3617 * readlink: new program
3618 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3619 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3620 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3621 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3622 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3623 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3626 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3627 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3628 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3629 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3630 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3631 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3632 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3633 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3634 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3635 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3636 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3637 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3639 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3640 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3641 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3643 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3644 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3645 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3646 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3647 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3648 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3649 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3650 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3653 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3654 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3657 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3658 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3659 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3660 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3661 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3662 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3663 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3666 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3667 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3669 ========================================================================
3670 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3671 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3674 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3676 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3677 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3678 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3679 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3680 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3681 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3682 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3683 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3684 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3685 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3686 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3687 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3689 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3690 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3691 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3692 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3694 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3697 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3699 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3700 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3701 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3702 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3703 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3704 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3705 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3708 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3709 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3710 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3711 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3712 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3713 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3714 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3715 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3716 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3717 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3718 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3719 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3720 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3721 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3722 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3723 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3725 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3726 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3728 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3729 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3730 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3731 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3732 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3733 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3735 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3736 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3737 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3738 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3739 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3740 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3741 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3743 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3744 the source files in the following example:
3745 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3746 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3747 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3748 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3749 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3750 links between source files with --preserve=links
3751 * cp accepts new options:
3752 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3753 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3754 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3755 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3756 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3757 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3758 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3759 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3760 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3762 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3763 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3764 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3765 even though it's older than dest.
3766 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3767 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3768 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3769 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3770 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3772 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3773 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3774 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3775 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3776 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3777 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3778 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3780 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3781 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3782 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3784 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3785 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3786 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3787 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3788 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3789 This is the default.
3791 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3792 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3793 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3794 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3795 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3797 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3800 ========================================================================
3801 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3802 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3805 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3806 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3808 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3809 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3810 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3811 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3812 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3814 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3815 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3816 that specifies a non-directory
3819 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3820 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3821 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3822 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3823 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3824 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3825 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3826 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3827 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3828 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3829 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3830 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3831 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3832 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3833 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3834 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3835 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3836 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3837 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3838 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3839 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3840 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3841 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3842 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3844 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3845 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3846 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3848 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3850 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3851 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3853 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3854 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3855 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3856 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3857 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3859 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3860 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3861 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3862 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3863 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3865 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3867 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3868 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3869 * still more portability fixes
3870 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3871 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3873 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3875 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3877 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3879 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3880 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3881 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3882 there is any time remaining
3883 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3885 ========================================================================
3886 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3887 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3889 This package began as the union of the following:
3890 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3892 ========================================================================
3894 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3896 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3897 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3898 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3899 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3900 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3901 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.