1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
8 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
11 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
12 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
14 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
16 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
17 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
18 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
20 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
21 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
22 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
24 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
25 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
26 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
27 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
29 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
30 from the source, when copying across file systems.
31 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
33 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
34 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
35 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
37 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
38 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
40 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
41 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
42 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
43 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
45 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
46 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
47 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
49 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
50 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
51 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
55 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
56 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
57 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
59 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
60 used to identify the split points.
62 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
63 command line argument through to the output.
65 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
68 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
69 a NUL instead of a white space character.
71 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
72 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
74 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
76 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
77 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
78 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
80 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
81 unique groups with empty lines.
83 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
84 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
86 shuf accepts a new option: --repetitions (-r), to allow repetitions
87 of input items in the permuted output.
89 ** Changes in behavior
91 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
92 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
93 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
94 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
96 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
97 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
99 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
100 not just the transfer counts.
102 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
103 as per the documented interface.
107 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
109 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
110 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
111 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
112 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
114 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
115 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
116 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
118 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
119 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
121 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
122 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
124 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
128 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
131 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
135 numfmt: reformat numbers
139 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
140 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
141 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
143 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
144 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
145 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
149 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
152 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
153 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
154 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
156 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
157 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
158 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
160 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
161 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
162 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
164 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
165 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
166 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
168 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
169 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
170 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
172 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
173 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
175 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
176 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
178 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
179 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
180 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
182 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
183 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
184 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
186 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
187 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
188 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
190 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
191 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
192 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
193 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
195 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
196 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
197 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
199 ** Changes in behavior
201 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
202 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
203 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
204 'total' in the target column.
206 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
207 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
208 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
210 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
211 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
215 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
216 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
218 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
219 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
221 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
225 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
226 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
227 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
228 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
229 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
230 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
231 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
232 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
233 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
234 for a patched distribution package.
236 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
237 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
239 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
240 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
241 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
242 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
245 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
249 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
251 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
252 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
253 sha384sum and sha512sum.
257 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
258 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
259 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
260 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
261 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
263 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
264 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
266 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
267 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
268 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
269 eventually exits nonzero.
271 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
272 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
273 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
274 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
275 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
277 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
278 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
279 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
281 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
282 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
283 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
285 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
286 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
287 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
289 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
290 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
291 Before, this would infloop:
292 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
293 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
295 ** Changes in behavior
297 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
301 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
302 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
303 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
304 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
305 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
308 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
309 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
310 format-changing options.
312 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
313 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
314 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
315 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
316 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
320 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
321 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
322 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
323 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
324 are run without following the instructions in README.
326 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
327 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
328 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
329 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
330 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
331 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
332 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
335 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
339 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
340 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
341 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
342 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
344 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
345 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
346 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
349 sort -u could read freed memory.
350 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
351 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
352 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
356 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
357 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
358 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
359 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
362 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
366 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
367 processes will not intersperse their output.
368 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
370 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
371 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
372 date: invalid date '\260'
373 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
375 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
376 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
377 lines output by df, can work reliably.
378 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
380 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
381 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
382 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
384 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
385 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
386 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
387 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
388 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
389 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
391 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
394 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
395 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
397 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
398 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
399 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
401 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
402 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
403 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
407 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
409 ** Changes in behavior
411 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
412 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
413 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
414 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
415 have any reason to include it here.
419 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
420 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
421 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
423 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
424 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
425 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
428 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
432 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
433 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
434 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
435 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
436 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
437 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
439 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
440 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
441 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
442 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
443 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
444 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
445 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
447 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
448 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
450 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
451 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
455 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
456 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
458 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
460 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
462 ** Changes in behavior
464 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
465 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
466 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
468 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
469 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
472 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
476 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
477 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
478 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
479 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
480 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
481 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
482 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
483 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
485 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
486 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
487 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
488 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
489 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
491 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
492 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
494 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
495 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
497 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
498 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
500 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
501 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
503 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
504 additional static suffix to output file names.
506 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
507 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
508 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
510 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
511 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
515 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
516 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
519 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
520 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
521 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
522 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
523 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
524 typically still point to one of the hard links.
526 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
527 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
528 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
529 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
530 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
532 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
533 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
534 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
535 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
539 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
540 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
541 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
543 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
544 instead of causing a usage failure.
546 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
549 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
553 realpath: print resolved file names.
557 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
558 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
560 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
563 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
564 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
565 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
566 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
567 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
568 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
570 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
571 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
572 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
574 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
575 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
576 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
578 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
579 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
580 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
581 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
582 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
584 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
586 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
587 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
589 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
590 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
591 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
593 ** Changes in behavior
595 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
596 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
597 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
598 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
599 usually-short referent instead.
601 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
602 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
603 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
604 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
607 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
611 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
612 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
613 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
615 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
616 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
618 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
619 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
623 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
624 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
626 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
627 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
628 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
629 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
631 ** Changes in behavior
633 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
634 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
635 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
639 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
640 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
641 only .tar.xz files is enough.
644 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
648 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
649 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
650 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
652 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
653 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
655 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
656 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
657 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
658 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
659 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
661 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
662 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
663 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
664 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
665 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
666 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
667 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
668 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
670 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
671 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
673 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
674 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
676 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
677 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
679 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
680 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
681 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
683 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
684 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
685 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
686 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
688 ** Changes in behavior
690 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
691 when -v or -c specified.
693 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
694 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
698 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
699 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
700 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
701 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
702 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
704 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
705 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
706 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
708 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
709 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
710 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
711 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
712 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
713 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
714 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
716 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
717 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
718 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
722 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
723 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
725 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
728 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
729 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
731 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
732 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
734 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
735 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
737 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
739 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
743 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
744 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
746 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
749 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
753 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
754 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
756 ** Changes in behavior
758 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
759 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
760 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
761 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
762 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
763 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
765 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
766 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
767 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
771 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
774 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
778 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
779 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
780 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
782 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
783 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
784 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
786 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
787 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
788 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
790 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
791 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
793 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
794 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
796 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
797 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
799 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
800 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
804 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
805 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
806 processed portion thereof.
808 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
809 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
811 ** Changes in behavior
813 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
814 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
815 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
817 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
818 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
819 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
821 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
822 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
824 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
825 Use --preserve-context instead.
827 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
830 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
834 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
835 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
836 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
837 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
838 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
840 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
841 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
843 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
844 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
845 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
847 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
848 reject file names invalid for that file system.
850 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
851 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
855 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
856 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
857 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
858 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
859 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
860 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
861 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
862 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
864 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
865 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
866 the same number of fields are output for each line.
868 ** Changes in behavior
870 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
871 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
872 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
875 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
879 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
880 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
884 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
888 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
889 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
891 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
892 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
894 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
895 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
897 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
898 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
899 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
900 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
902 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
903 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
905 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
906 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
907 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
909 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
911 ** Changes in behavior
913 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
914 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
915 to the number of available processors.
919 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
922 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
926 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
927 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
928 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
929 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
931 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
932 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
933 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
935 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
936 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
938 ** Changes in behavior
940 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
941 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
943 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
944 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
945 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
946 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
947 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
948 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
950 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
951 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
952 the same way as the others.
954 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
955 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
958 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
962 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
963 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
964 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
966 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
967 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
969 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
970 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
971 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
973 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
974 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
976 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
977 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
979 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
980 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
981 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
983 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
984 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
985 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
986 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
990 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
991 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
993 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
996 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
997 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
999 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1001 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1002 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1003 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1005 ** Changes in behavior
1007 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1008 rather than its aliased target.
1010 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1011 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1012 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1014 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1015 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1016 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1017 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1018 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1019 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1020 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1021 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1023 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1025 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1027 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1028 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1031 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1032 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1033 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1034 control like taskset for example.
1036 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1038 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1039 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1040 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1041 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1042 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1043 includes %C when context information is available.
1045 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1046 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1047 rather than a file system attribute.
1049 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1050 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1051 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1052 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1054 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1055 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1056 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1058 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1059 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1060 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1063 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1067 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1070 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1072 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1073 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1075 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1076 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1077 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1078 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1080 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1081 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1082 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1086 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1087 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1089 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1090 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1091 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1093 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1094 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1095 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1096 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1097 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1098 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1099 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1100 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1101 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1103 ** Changes in behavior
1105 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1106 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1108 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1109 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1112 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1116 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1117 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1118 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1119 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1123 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1124 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1126 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1127 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1128 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1129 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1131 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1132 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1133 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1136 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1140 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1141 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1142 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1144 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1145 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1146 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1148 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1149 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1151 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1152 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1153 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1154 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1156 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1157 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1160 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1161 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1162 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1165 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1166 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1167 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1169 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1170 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1171 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1172 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1174 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1175 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1178 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1179 processes will not intersperse their output.
1180 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1183 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1187 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1190 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1191 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1193 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1194 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1195 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1196 the presence of the empty string argument.
1197 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1199 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1200 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1201 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1202 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1204 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1205 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1207 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1208 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1209 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1211 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1212 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1213 and with a malicious user on the same system
1214 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1215 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1218 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1222 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1223 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1224 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1226 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1227 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1228 offending directory and all "contents."
1230 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1231 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1232 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1234 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1235 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1236 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1238 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1239 processes will not intersperse their output.
1240 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1241 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1243 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1244 output the name of the file to stdout.
1245 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1247 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1248 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1249 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1251 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1252 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1255 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1256 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1257 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1259 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1260 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1261 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1262 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1263 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1264 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1266 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1267 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1268 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1269 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1271 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1272 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1274 ** Changes in behavior
1276 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1277 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1278 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1279 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1280 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1282 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1283 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1284 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1285 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1287 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1289 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1290 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1291 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1292 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1293 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1297 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1301 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1302 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1304 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1305 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1307 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1308 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1309 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1311 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1312 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1315 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1319 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1320 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1321 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1323 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1324 to accommodate leap seconds.
1325 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1327 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1328 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1329 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1331 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1333 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1334 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1335 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1337 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1338 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1339 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1340 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1341 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1345 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1346 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1347 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1348 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1350 ** Changes in behavior
1352 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1353 environment variable is set.
1355 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1356 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1357 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1361 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1362 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1363 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1364 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1366 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1367 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1368 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1369 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1373 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1374 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1375 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1377 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1378 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1379 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1380 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1381 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1382 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1383 another improvement:
1385 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1386 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1389 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1393 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1394 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1395 and libraries tested at configure time.
1396 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1398 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1399 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1401 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1402 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1404 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1405 printing a summary to stderr.
1406 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1408 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1409 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1410 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1412 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1413 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1415 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1416 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1417 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1418 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1420 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1421 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1422 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1423 which is relatively unusual.
1424 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1426 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1427 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1428 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1429 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1430 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1431 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1432 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1436 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1437 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1438 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1439 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1440 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1444 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1445 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1447 ** Changes in behavior
1449 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1450 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1451 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1452 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1453 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1456 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1460 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1461 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1463 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1464 before data copying has started.
1466 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1467 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1469 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1470 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1471 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1472 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1474 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1475 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1476 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1477 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1479 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1484 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1485 for its standard streams.
1487 ** Changes in behavior
1489 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1490 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1491 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1492 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1493 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1494 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1496 ** Deprecated options
1498 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1499 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1503 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1505 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1506 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1507 a btrfs file system.
1509 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1511 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1512 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1514 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1515 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1518 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1522 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1523 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1524 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1525 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1527 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1528 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1529 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1530 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1531 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1536 make check: two tests have been corrected
1540 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1541 inherited from gnulib.
1544 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1548 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1549 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1550 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1551 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1553 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1554 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1556 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1558 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1559 systems without xattr support.
1561 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1562 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1563 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1565 ** Changes in behavior
1567 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1568 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1569 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1570 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1572 ** Improved robustness
1574 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1575 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1576 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1577 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1578 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1579 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1580 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1581 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1582 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1586 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1587 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1589 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1590 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1591 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1592 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1593 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1596 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1600 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1601 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1602 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1606 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1607 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1608 data was read, or on process exit.
1609 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1611 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1612 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1613 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1614 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1616 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1617 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1618 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1619 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1621 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1622 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1624 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1625 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1627 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1628 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1629 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1631 ** Changes in behavior
1633 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1634 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1635 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1637 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1638 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1640 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1641 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1642 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1645 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1649 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1651 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1652 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1653 install: Never copies xattrs
1655 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1656 from overwriting any existing destination file
1658 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1659 mode where this feature is available.
1661 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1662 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1663 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1664 do not modify the destination at all.
1666 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1668 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1672 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1673 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1675 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1677 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1678 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1680 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1681 processing the first file name
1683 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1684 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1685 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1686 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1688 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1689 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1691 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1692 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1695 ** Changes in behavior
1697 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1698 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1700 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1701 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1702 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1704 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1705 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1707 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1709 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1710 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1711 is still marked with a '+'.
1714 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1718 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1719 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1723 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1724 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1725 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1726 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1727 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1728 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1730 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1731 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1733 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1734 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1736 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1738 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1739 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1740 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1742 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1743 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1745 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1746 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1747 used to factor large numbers.
1749 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1752 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1754 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1756 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1757 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1759 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1760 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1761 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1762 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1764 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1765 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1766 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1768 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1769 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1773 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1775 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1776 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1778 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1779 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1781 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1783 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1784 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1788 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1789 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1790 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1792 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1794 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1795 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1796 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1798 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1799 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1800 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1802 ** Changes in behavior
1804 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1805 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1808 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1812 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1813 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1814 'futimens' system calls.
1818 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1820 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1821 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1822 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1824 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1825 with no USERNAME argument.
1827 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1828 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1829 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1831 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1832 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1833 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1834 number of fields for some inputs.
1836 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1837 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1839 ** Changes in behavior
1841 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1842 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1845 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1849 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1851 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1852 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1853 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1854 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1856 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1857 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1859 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1860 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1862 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1863 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1865 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1866 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1867 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1868 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1870 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1871 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1872 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1873 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1874 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1875 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1877 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1878 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1880 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1881 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1882 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1884 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1885 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1887 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1888 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1890 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1891 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1892 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1893 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1895 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1896 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1898 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1899 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1901 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1902 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1903 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1907 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1908 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1910 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1911 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1912 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1913 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1917 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1918 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1920 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1922 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1926 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1927 which have negative errno values.
1931 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1935 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1939 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1940 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1943 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1947 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1948 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1949 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1951 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1952 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1953 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1954 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1958 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1959 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1960 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1961 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1964 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1968 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1970 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1971 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1972 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1975 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1979 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1980 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1982 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1984 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1986 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1988 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1992 ** Changes in behavior
1994 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1995 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1997 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1998 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2000 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2001 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2002 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2006 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2007 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2008 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2009 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2010 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2011 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2012 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2013 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2014 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2015 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2016 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2018 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2019 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2020 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2023 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2026 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2027 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2028 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2030 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2031 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2032 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2035 ** New build options
2037 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2038 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2039 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2040 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2042 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2043 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2044 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2045 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2046 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2047 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2048 of "make check" fail.
2050 ** Remove deprecated options
2052 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2053 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2054 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2055 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2056 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2058 ** Improved robustness
2060 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2061 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2062 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2063 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2064 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2065 loss of the contents of a/f.
2067 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2068 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2072 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2073 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2074 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2076 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2077 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2078 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2079 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2081 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2082 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2083 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2084 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2085 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2086 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2087 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2088 destination is a symlink.
2090 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2092 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2093 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2095 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2096 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2098 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2100 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2101 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2103 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2104 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2106 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2109 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2110 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2112 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2113 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2115 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2116 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2117 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2118 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2120 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2121 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2122 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2124 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2125 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2126 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2128 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2129 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2130 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2131 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2133 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2134 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2135 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2137 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2138 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2140 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2141 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2143 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2145 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2146 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2147 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2149 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2150 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2152 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2153 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2155 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2156 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2158 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2159 [present in the original version]
2162 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2166 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2168 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2169 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2170 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2172 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2173 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2175 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2179 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2180 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2182 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2183 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2185 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2186 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2188 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2189 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2190 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2191 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2192 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2193 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2195 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2196 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2199 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2200 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2202 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2205 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2206 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2207 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2209 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2210 directory is unreadable.
2212 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2213 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2214 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2216 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2217 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2218 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2219 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2220 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2223 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2224 Before it would print nothing.
2226 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2228 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2229 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2230 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2231 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2232 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2233 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2234 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2235 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2237 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2241 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2242 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2243 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2245 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2246 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2247 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2248 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2251 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2255 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2256 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2257 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2258 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2259 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2260 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2261 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2263 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2264 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2265 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2266 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2267 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2268 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2269 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2270 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2272 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2273 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2274 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2277 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2281 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2282 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2284 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2285 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2286 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2288 ** Improved robustness
2290 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2291 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2292 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2295 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2299 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2300 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2301 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2302 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2303 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2305 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2309 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2312 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2316 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2317 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2318 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2319 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2321 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2322 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2324 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2325 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2326 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2329 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2331 ** Improved robustness
2333 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2334 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2336 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2337 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2338 or NFS-mounted partition.
2340 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2341 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2345 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2346 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2347 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2348 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2349 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2350 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2352 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2353 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2355 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2356 or neglect to report file removal.
2358 For the "groups" command:
2360 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2361 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2363 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2365 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2367 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2371 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2372 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2375 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2377 ** Changes in behavior
2379 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2380 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2381 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2382 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2384 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2385 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2386 a final './' or '../' component.
2388 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2389 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2390 this only for pipes.
2392 ** Infrastructure changes
2394 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2395 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2396 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2397 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2401 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2402 name is "." or "..".
2404 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2405 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2406 dirent.d_type support.
2408 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2409 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2411 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2412 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2413 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2414 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2417 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2419 ** Changes in behavior
2421 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2425 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2426 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2430 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2431 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2432 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2434 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2435 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2437 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2438 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2440 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2442 ** Improved robustness
2444 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2445 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2446 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2448 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2449 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2452 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2453 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2455 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2456 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2458 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2459 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2461 ** Changes in behavior
2463 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2464 where the two are distinct.
2466 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2467 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2468 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2469 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2470 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2471 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2472 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2473 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2474 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2475 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2476 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2477 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2478 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2479 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2480 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2481 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2482 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2484 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2485 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2486 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2488 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2489 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2490 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2491 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2494 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2495 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2499 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2500 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2501 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2502 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2504 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2505 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2506 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2508 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2509 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2510 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2511 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2512 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2515 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2516 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2518 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2519 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2520 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2521 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2523 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2524 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2525 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2527 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2528 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2529 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2530 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2532 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2533 and sticky) with the -m option.
2535 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2536 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2537 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2538 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2539 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2541 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2542 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2544 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2548 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2549 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2550 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2551 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2553 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2555 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2557 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2558 silently ignoring one of them.
2560 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2561 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2562 containing this change was 5.92.
2564 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2565 automatically newline terminated.
2567 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2568 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2569 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2570 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2573 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2574 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2575 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2578 ** Scheduled for removal
2580 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2581 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2583 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2584 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2585 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2586 command to unlink a directory.
2588 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2589 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2590 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2591 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2595 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2596 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2597 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2598 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2599 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2600 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2604 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2605 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2607 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2609 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2610 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2611 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2613 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2614 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2617 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2618 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2620 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2621 list directories before files.
2623 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2624 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2625 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2626 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2629 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2631 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2633 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2634 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2635 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2637 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2638 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2642 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2643 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2644 usually printing nothing.
2646 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2648 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2649 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2650 them with hard-linked directories.
2652 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2653 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2654 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2656 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2657 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2658 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2660 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2663 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2664 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2666 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2667 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2669 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2670 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2672 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2673 all command-line arguments.
2675 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2677 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2679 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2680 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2682 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2684 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2685 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2686 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2687 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2688 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2690 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2691 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2693 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2694 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2695 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2696 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2698 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2700 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2704 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2705 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2707 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2708 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2710 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2711 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2713 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2714 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2716 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2717 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2719 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2721 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2722 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2723 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2726 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2728 ** Build-related bug fixes
2730 installing .mo files would fail
2733 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2737 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2739 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2742 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2746 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2747 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2751 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2753 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2754 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2756 ** Deprecated options
2758 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2759 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2761 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2765 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2767 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2768 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2769 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2770 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2772 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2775 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2781 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2786 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2788 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2790 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2791 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2792 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2794 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2795 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2796 problematic usages. These include:
2798 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2799 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2800 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2801 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2802 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2803 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2804 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2805 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2806 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2808 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2809 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2811 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2812 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2813 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2814 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2816 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2817 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2818 between binary and text files.
2820 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2824 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2828 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2829 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2831 head tac tail tee tr
2832 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2834 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2835 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2837 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2838 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2839 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2841 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2843 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2845 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2846 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2847 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2851 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2853 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2854 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2856 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2857 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2858 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2862 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2863 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2867 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2868 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2869 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2873 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2874 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2878 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2880 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2882 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2886 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2887 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2888 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2890 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2891 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2892 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2893 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2894 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2896 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2900 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2901 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2902 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2904 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2906 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2907 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2908 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2909 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2911 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2913 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2914 rather than silently wrapping around.
2916 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2917 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2919 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2920 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2922 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2923 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2924 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2925 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2927 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2929 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2931 ** Improved robustness
2933 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2934 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2935 no matter how large the result.
2937 ** Improved portability
2939 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2940 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2942 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2944 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2945 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2946 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2948 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2949 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2953 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2954 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2956 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2958 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2959 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2960 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2961 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2963 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2964 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2966 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2967 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2968 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2970 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2972 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2973 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2975 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2976 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2978 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2980 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2981 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2983 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2984 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2986 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2987 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2988 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2990 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2992 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2994 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2998 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3000 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3001 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3002 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3004 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3005 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3007 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3008 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3009 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3011 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3012 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3014 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3015 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3016 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3017 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3019 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3020 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3022 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3023 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3024 the file system does not support it.
3026 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3028 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3029 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3031 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3033 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3034 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3036 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3037 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3038 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3039 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3041 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3042 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3045 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3046 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3047 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3048 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3050 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3051 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3052 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3053 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3055 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3056 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3058 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3060 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3061 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3062 reporting incorrect results.
3066 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3067 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3069 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3072 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3074 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3075 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3077 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3078 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3080 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3083 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3084 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3085 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3086 the file name does not look like a page range.
3088 printf has several changes:
3090 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3091 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3093 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3094 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3095 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3097 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3098 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3101 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3102 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3104 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3105 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3107 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3109 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3110 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3112 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3114 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3116 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3117 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3118 when first encountering the directory.
3122 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3123 output; POSIX requires this.
3125 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3126 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3128 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3130 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3131 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3133 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3134 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3136 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3137 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3138 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3139 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3140 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3141 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3142 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3144 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3145 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3146 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3148 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3149 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3151 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3153 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3155 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3156 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3157 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3158 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3160 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3164 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3165 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3166 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3167 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3168 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3170 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3171 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3172 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3174 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3175 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3177 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3178 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3180 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3181 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3182 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3183 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3184 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3186 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3187 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3189 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3190 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3192 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3194 nocreat do not create the output file
3195 excl fail if the output file already exists
3196 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3197 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3199 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3201 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3202 direct use direct I/O for data
3203 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3204 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3205 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3206 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3207 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3209 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3211 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3212 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3215 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3216 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3217 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3218 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3219 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3220 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3222 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3223 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3225 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3228 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3230 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3232 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3233 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3235 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3236 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3237 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3239 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3240 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3241 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3243 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3245 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3246 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3248 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3249 for compatibility with bash.
3251 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3253 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3254 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3255 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3256 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3258 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3259 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3261 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3262 ls supports TABSIZE.
3263 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3264 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3265 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3267 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3270 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3272 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3273 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3274 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3275 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3276 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3277 an offset, not as a file name.
3279 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3280 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3282 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3283 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3285 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3286 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3288 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3289 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3290 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3292 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3293 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3295 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3296 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3300 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3302 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3304 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3308 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3309 or more arguments between partitions.
3311 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3312 holes in the destination.
3314 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3315 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3316 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3317 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3318 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3319 terminates immediately.
3321 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3323 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3325 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3326 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3327 not the empty string.
3329 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3330 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3334 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3335 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3336 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3339 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3346 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3350 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3351 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3353 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3354 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3356 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3357 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3358 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3361 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3365 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3366 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3368 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3369 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3371 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3372 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3373 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3375 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3377 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3380 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3382 ** Configuration option
3384 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3385 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3389 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3390 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3394 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3395 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3396 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3399 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3400 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3401 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3402 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3403 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3404 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3405 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3408 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3412 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3413 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3414 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3416 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3417 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3419 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3421 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3422 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3423 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3424 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3426 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3428 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3429 not just the ones that reference directories
3431 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3432 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3434 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3435 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3436 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3438 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3439 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3440 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3441 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3442 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3443 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3445 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3450 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3451 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3453 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3455 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3457 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3459 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3460 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3462 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3463 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3465 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3467 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3471 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3473 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3475 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3476 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3477 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3478 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3479 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3481 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3482 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3484 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3485 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3487 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3488 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3490 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3491 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3492 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3496 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3497 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3498 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3499 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3500 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3501 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3502 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3503 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3504 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3505 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3506 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3507 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3508 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3509 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3511 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3513 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3514 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3516 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3518 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3520 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3521 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3523 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3525 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3526 without a trailing newline.
3528 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3529 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3531 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3534 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3538 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3540 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3542 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3543 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3544 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3545 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3547 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3549 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3550 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3551 be printed without leading spaces.
3553 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3554 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3559 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3560 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3561 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3563 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3565 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3566 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3568 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3569 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3571 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3572 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3574 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3576 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3578 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3580 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3581 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3583 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3585 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3587 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3588 byte offsets are specified.
3591 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3594 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3597 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3598 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3599 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3600 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3601 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3602 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3603 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3604 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3605 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3606 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3607 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3608 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3609 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3610 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3611 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3612 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3613 directory where M has write access.
3614 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3615 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3616 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3619 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3620 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3621 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3622 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3623 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3624 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3625 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3626 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3627 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3628 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3629 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3630 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3631 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3632 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3633 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3634 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3635 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3636 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3637 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3638 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3639 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3640 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3641 appeared one additional time.
3643 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3644 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3645 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3646 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3649 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3650 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3651 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3652 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3653 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3654 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3655 if there were more than 338.
3657 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3658 - false --help now exits nonzero
3661 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3662 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3663 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3664 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3667 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3668 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3669 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3670 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3671 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3674 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3675 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3676 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3677 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3678 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3679 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3680 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3683 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3684 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3685 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3686 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3687 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3688 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3690 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3691 under certain unusual conditions
3692 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3693 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3696 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3697 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3698 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3699 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3700 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3701 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3702 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3703 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3704 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3705 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3706 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3707 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3708 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3709 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3710 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3711 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3714 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3715 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3718 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3719 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3720 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3721 involving hard-linked directories
3722 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3723 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3724 character-special and block files
3727 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3728 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3729 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3730 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3731 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3732 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3733 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3734 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3735 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3737 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3738 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3739 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3740 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3741 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3742 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3743 specified on the command line.
3744 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3745 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3746 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3747 the first file untouched.
3748 * readlink: new program
3749 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3750 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3751 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3752 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3753 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3754 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3757 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3758 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3759 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3760 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3761 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3762 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3763 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3764 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3765 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3766 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3767 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3768 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3770 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3771 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3772 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3774 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3775 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3776 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3777 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3778 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3779 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3780 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3781 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3784 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3785 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3788 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3789 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3790 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3791 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3792 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3793 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3794 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3797 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3798 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3800 ========================================================================
3801 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3802 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3805 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3807 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3808 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3809 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3810 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3811 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3812 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3813 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3814 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3815 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3816 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3817 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3818 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3820 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3821 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3822 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3823 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3825 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3828 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3830 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3831 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3832 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3833 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3834 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3835 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3836 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3839 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3840 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3841 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3842 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3843 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3844 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3845 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3846 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3847 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3848 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3849 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3850 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3851 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3852 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3853 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3854 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3856 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3857 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3859 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3860 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3861 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3862 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3863 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3864 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3866 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3867 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3868 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3869 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3870 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3871 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3872 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3874 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3875 the source files in the following example:
3876 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3877 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3878 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3879 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3880 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3881 links between source files with --preserve=links
3882 * cp accepts new options:
3883 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3884 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3885 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3886 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3887 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3888 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3889 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3890 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3891 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3893 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3894 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3895 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3896 even though it's older than dest.
3897 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3898 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3899 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3900 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3901 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3903 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3904 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3905 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3906 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3907 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3908 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3909 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3911 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3912 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3913 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3915 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3916 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3917 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3918 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3919 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3920 This is the default.
3922 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3923 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3924 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3925 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3926 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3928 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3931 ========================================================================
3932 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3933 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3936 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3937 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3939 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3940 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3941 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3942 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3943 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3945 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3946 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3947 that specifies a non-directory
3950 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3951 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3952 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3953 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3954 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3955 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3956 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3957 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3958 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3959 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3960 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3961 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3962 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3963 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3964 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3965 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3966 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3967 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3968 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3969 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3970 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3971 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3972 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3973 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3975 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3976 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3977 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3979 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3981 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3982 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3984 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3985 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3986 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3987 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3988 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3990 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3991 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3992 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3993 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3994 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3996 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3998 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3999 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4000 * still more portability fixes
4001 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4002 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4004 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4006 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4008 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4010 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4011 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4012 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4013 there is any time remaining
4014 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4016 ========================================================================
4017 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4018 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4020 This package began as the union of the following:
4021 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4023 ========================================================================
4025 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4027 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4028 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4029 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4030 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4031 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4032 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.