1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
8 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
9 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
10 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
12 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
13 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
14 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
15 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
16 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
18 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
19 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
20 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
21 now fails instead of losing the data.
22 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
24 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
25 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
26 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
28 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
29 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
32 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
33 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
36 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
37 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
38 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
40 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
41 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
44 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
45 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
46 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
48 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
49 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
50 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
52 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
53 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
56 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
59 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
60 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
61 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
63 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
64 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
66 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
67 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
68 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
69 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
71 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
72 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
73 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
75 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
76 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
79 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
80 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
84 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
85 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
86 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
88 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
89 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
91 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
92 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
94 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
95 executing the subsidiary program.
97 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
101 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
103 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped
104 and the reader of the pipe terminates.
106 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
107 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
108 is effective in this case.
111 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
115 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
116 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
117 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
119 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
120 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
123 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
124 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
125 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
127 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
128 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
129 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
131 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
132 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
133 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
135 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
136 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
137 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
138 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
139 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
141 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
142 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
143 depending on the size of the first file processed.
144 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
148 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
149 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
150 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
151 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
153 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
154 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
155 time zone is indeterminate.
157 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
158 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
159 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
160 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
162 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
163 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
164 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
166 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
167 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
169 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
170 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
171 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
175 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
176 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
177 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
180 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
184 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
185 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
188 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
189 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
192 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
193 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
194 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
195 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
196 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
198 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
199 System V style platforms where this information is available only
200 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
202 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
203 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
205 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
206 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
209 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
210 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
211 defaults to a different SELinux context.
213 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
214 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
216 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
217 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
218 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
220 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
221 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
223 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
224 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
225 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
227 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
229 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
230 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
232 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
233 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
235 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
236 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
238 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
241 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
242 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
243 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
244 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
246 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
247 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
248 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
250 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
251 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
252 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
254 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
255 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
256 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
258 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
259 only doing so if --retry is specified.
260 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
262 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
263 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
265 ** Changes in behavior
267 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
269 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
270 values for any argument.
272 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
273 they are out of localtime range.
275 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
276 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
277 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
278 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
282 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
283 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
284 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
286 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
287 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
289 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
290 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
292 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
294 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
295 written to a terminal.
297 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
298 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
300 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
301 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
302 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
303 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
304 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
305 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
306 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
307 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
308 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
309 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
310 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
312 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
313 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
317 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
318 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
322 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
324 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
325 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
327 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
330 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
334 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
335 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
336 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
337 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
339 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
342 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
343 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
346 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
349 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
350 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
353 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
354 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
356 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
357 that specify an offset for the first field.
358 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
360 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
361 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
365 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
366 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
370 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
371 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
373 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
374 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
375 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
376 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
377 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
379 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
380 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
381 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
383 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
384 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
385 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
387 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
388 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
390 ** Changes in behavior
392 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
393 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
395 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
396 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
398 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
399 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
401 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
402 when outputting to a terminal.
404 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
408 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
409 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
411 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
412 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
414 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
415 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
416 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
418 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
419 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
421 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
422 upon detection of a directory cycle.
423 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
425 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
427 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
428 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
429 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
431 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
432 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
435 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
439 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
440 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
442 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
443 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
445 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
446 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
447 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
449 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
450 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
451 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
452 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
454 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
455 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
456 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
457 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
459 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
460 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
462 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
463 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
465 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
466 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
467 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
469 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
470 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
471 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
473 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
474 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
475 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
477 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
478 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
479 character at the 4GiB position.
480 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
482 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
483 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
485 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
486 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
488 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
489 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
492 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
493 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
495 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
496 replaced before inotify watches were created.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
499 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
500 [bug introduced in the beginning]
502 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
503 when those files are being created or renamed.
504 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
508 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
509 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
510 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
511 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
513 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
514 on stderr approximately every second.
516 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
517 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
519 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
520 other than the default newline character.
522 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
523 a useful setting with high latency links.
525 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
526 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
528 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
529 and output errors in general.
531 ** Changes in behavior
533 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
534 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
535 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
536 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
538 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
539 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
540 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
541 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
542 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
544 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
545 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
547 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
549 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
550 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
552 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
553 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
557 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
558 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
560 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
561 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
563 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
564 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
566 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
567 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
569 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
571 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
572 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
573 documentation are provided.
576 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
580 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
581 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
583 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
584 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
585 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
586 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
588 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
589 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
590 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
591 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
593 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
594 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
596 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
597 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
599 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
600 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
601 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
602 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
603 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
604 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
618 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
620 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
621 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
622 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
623 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
624 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
625 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
627 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
628 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
629 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
630 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
632 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
633 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
636 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
637 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
638 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
641 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
642 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
643 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
645 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
646 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
647 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
649 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
650 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
651 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
652 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
653 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
655 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
656 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
659 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
660 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
662 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
663 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
664 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
666 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
667 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
669 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
670 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
672 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
673 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
675 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
676 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
678 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
679 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
680 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
682 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
683 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
687 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
688 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
690 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
691 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
692 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
693 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
694 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
695 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
696 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
697 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
698 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
699 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
700 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
701 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
702 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
703 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
704 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
705 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
706 it suitable for embedded system.
708 ** Changes in behavior
710 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
711 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
713 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
714 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
716 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
717 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
718 will result in the delayed output of lines.
720 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
721 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
722 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
726 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
727 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
728 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
730 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
732 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
733 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
734 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
736 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
737 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
738 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
739 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
741 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
742 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
744 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
745 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
746 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
749 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
753 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
754 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
755 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
757 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
758 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
759 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
760 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
762 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
763 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
764 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
766 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
767 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
769 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
771 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
772 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
773 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
775 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
776 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
777 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
779 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
780 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
781 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
782 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
784 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
785 from the source, when copying across file systems.
786 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
788 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
789 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
790 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
792 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
793 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
795 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
796 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
797 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
798 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
800 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
801 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
802 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
804 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
805 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
806 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
810 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
811 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
812 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
814 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
815 used to identify the split points.
817 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
818 command line argument through to the output.
820 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
823 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
824 a NUL instead of a white space character.
826 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
827 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
829 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
831 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
832 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
833 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
835 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
836 unique groups with empty lines.
838 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
839 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
841 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
844 ** Changes in behavior
846 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
847 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
848 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
849 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
851 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
852 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
854 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
855 not just the transfer counts.
857 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
859 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
860 as per the documented interface.
864 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
866 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
867 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
868 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
869 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
871 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
872 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
873 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
874 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
876 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
877 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
878 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
880 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
881 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
883 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
884 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
886 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
890 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
893 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
897 numfmt: reformat numbers
901 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
902 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
903 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
905 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
906 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
907 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
909 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
910 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
914 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
917 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
918 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
919 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
921 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
922 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
923 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
925 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
926 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
927 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
929 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
930 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
931 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
933 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
934 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
935 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
937 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
938 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
940 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
941 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
943 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
944 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
945 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
947 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
948 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
949 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
951 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
952 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
953 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
955 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
956 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
957 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
958 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
960 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
961 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
962 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
964 ** Changes in behavior
966 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
967 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
968 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
969 'total' in the target column.
971 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
972 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
973 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
975 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
976 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
978 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
979 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
983 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
984 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
986 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
987 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
989 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
993 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
994 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
995 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
996 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
997 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
998 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
999 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1000 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1001 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1002 for a patched distribution package.
1004 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1005 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1007 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1008 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1009 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1010 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1013 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1017 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1019 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1020 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1021 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1025 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1026 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1027 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1028 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1029 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1031 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1032 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1034 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1035 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1036 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1037 eventually exits nonzero.
1039 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1040 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1041 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1042 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1043 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1045 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1046 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1047 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1049 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1050 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1051 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1053 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1054 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1055 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1057 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1058 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1059 Before, this would infloop:
1060 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1061 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1063 ** Changes in behavior
1065 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1069 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1070 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1071 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1072 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1073 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1076 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1077 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1078 format-changing options.
1080 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1081 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1082 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1083 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1084 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1088 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1089 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1090 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1091 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1092 are run without following the instructions in README.
1094 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1095 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1096 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1097 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1098 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1099 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1100 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1103 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1107 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1108 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1109 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1110 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1112 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1113 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1114 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1115 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1117 sort -u could read freed memory.
1118 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1119 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1124 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1125 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1126 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1127 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1130 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1134 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1135 processes will not intersperse their output.
1136 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1138 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1139 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1140 date: invalid date '\260'
1141 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1143 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1144 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1145 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1146 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1148 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1149 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1150 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1152 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1153 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1154 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1155 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1156 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1157 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1159 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1160 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1162 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1163 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1165 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1166 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1167 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1169 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1170 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1171 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1175 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1177 ** Changes in behavior
1179 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1180 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1181 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1182 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1183 have any reason to include it here.
1187 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1188 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1189 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1191 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1192 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1193 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1196 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1200 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1201 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1202 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1203 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1204 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1205 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1207 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1208 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1209 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1210 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1211 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1212 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1213 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1215 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1216 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1218 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1219 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1223 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1224 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1226 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1228 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1230 ** Changes in behavior
1232 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1233 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1234 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1236 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1237 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1240 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1244 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1245 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1246 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1247 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1248 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1249 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1250 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1251 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1253 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1254 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1255 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1256 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1257 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1259 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1260 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1262 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1263 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1265 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1266 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1268 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1269 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1271 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1272 additional static suffix to output file names.
1274 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1275 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1276 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1278 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1279 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1283 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1284 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1285 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1287 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1288 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1289 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1290 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1291 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1292 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1294 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1295 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1296 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1297 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1298 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1300 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1301 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1302 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1303 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1307 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1308 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1309 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1311 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1312 instead of causing a usage failure.
1314 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1317 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1321 realpath: print resolved file names.
1325 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1326 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1328 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1329 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1331 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1332 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1333 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1334 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1335 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1336 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1338 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1339 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1340 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1342 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1343 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1344 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1346 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1347 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1348 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1349 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1350 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1352 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1354 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1355 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1357 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1358 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1359 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1361 ** Changes in behavior
1363 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1364 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1365 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1366 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1367 usually-short referent instead.
1369 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1370 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1371 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1372 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1375 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1379 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1380 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1381 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1383 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1384 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1386 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1387 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1391 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1392 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1394 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1395 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1396 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1397 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1399 ** Changes in behavior
1401 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1402 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1403 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1407 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1408 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1409 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1412 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1416 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1417 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1418 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1420 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1421 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1423 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1424 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1425 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1426 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1427 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1429 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1430 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1431 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1432 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1433 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1434 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1435 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1436 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1438 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1439 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1441 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1442 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1444 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1445 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1447 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1448 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1449 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1451 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1452 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1453 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1454 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1456 ** Changes in behavior
1458 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1459 when -v or -c specified.
1461 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1462 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1466 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1467 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1468 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1469 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1470 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1472 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1473 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1474 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1476 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1477 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1478 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1479 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1480 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1481 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1482 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1484 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1485 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1486 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1490 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1491 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1493 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1496 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1497 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1499 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1500 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1502 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1503 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1505 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1507 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1511 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1512 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1514 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1517 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1521 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1522 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1524 ** Changes in behavior
1526 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1527 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1528 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1529 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1530 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1531 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1532 resolved for 2.6.39.
1533 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1534 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1535 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1539 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1542 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1546 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1547 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1548 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1550 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1551 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1552 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1554 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1555 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1556 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1558 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1559 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1561 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1562 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1564 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1565 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1567 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1568 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1572 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1573 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1574 processed portion thereof.
1576 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1577 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1579 ** Changes in behavior
1581 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1582 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1583 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1585 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1586 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1587 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1589 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1590 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1592 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1593 Use --preserve-context instead.
1595 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1598 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1602 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1603 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1604 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1605 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1606 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1608 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1609 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1611 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1612 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1613 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1615 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1616 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1618 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1619 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1623 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1624 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1625 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1626 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1627 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1628 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1629 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1630 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1632 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1633 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1634 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1636 ** Changes in behavior
1638 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1639 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1640 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1643 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1647 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1648 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1649 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1652 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1656 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1657 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1659 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1660 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1662 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1663 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1665 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1666 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1667 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1668 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1670 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1671 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1673 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1674 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1675 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1677 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1679 ** Changes in behavior
1681 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1682 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1683 to the number of available processors.
1687 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1690 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1694 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1695 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1696 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1697 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1699 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1700 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1701 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1703 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1704 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1706 ** Changes in behavior
1708 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1709 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1711 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1712 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1713 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1714 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1715 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1716 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1718 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1719 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1720 the same way as the others.
1722 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1723 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1726 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1730 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1731 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1732 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1734 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1735 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1737 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1738 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1739 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1741 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1742 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1744 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1745 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1747 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1748 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1749 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1751 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1752 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1753 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1754 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1758 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1759 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1761 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1764 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1765 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1767 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1769 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1770 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1771 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1773 ** Changes in behavior
1775 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1776 rather than its aliased target.
1778 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1779 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1780 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1782 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1783 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1784 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1785 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1786 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1787 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1788 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1789 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1791 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1793 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1795 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1796 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1799 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1800 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1801 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1802 control like taskset for example.
1804 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1806 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1807 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1808 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1809 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1810 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1811 includes %C when context information is available.
1813 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1814 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1815 rather than a file system attribute.
1817 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1818 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1819 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1820 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1822 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1823 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1824 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1826 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1827 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1828 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1831 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1835 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1836 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1838 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1840 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1841 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1843 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1844 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1845 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1846 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1848 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1849 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1850 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1854 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1855 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1857 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1858 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1859 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1861 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1862 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1863 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1864 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1865 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1866 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1867 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1868 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1869 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1871 ** Changes in behavior
1873 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1874 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1876 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1877 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1880 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1884 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1885 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1886 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1887 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1891 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1892 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1894 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1895 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1896 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1897 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1899 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1900 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1901 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1904 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1908 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1909 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1910 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1912 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1913 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1914 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1916 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1917 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1919 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1920 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1921 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1922 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1924 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1925 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1926 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1928 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1929 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1930 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1931 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1933 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1934 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1935 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1937 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1938 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1939 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1940 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1942 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1943 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1944 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1946 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1947 processes will not intersperse their output.
1948 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1951 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1955 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1956 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1958 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1959 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1961 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1962 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1963 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1964 the presence of the empty string argument.
1965 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1967 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1968 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1969 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1970 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1972 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1973 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1975 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1976 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1977 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1979 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1980 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1981 and with a malicious user on the same system
1982 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1983 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1986 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1990 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1991 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1992 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1994 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1995 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1996 offending directory and all "contents."
1998 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1999 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2000 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2002 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2003 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2004 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2006 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2007 processes will not intersperse their output.
2008 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2009 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2011 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2012 output the name of the file to stdout.
2013 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2015 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2016 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2017 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2019 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2020 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2023 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2024 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2025 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2027 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2028 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2029 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2030 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2031 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2032 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2034 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2035 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2036 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2037 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2039 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2040 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2042 ** Changes in behavior
2044 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2045 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2046 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2047 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2048 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2050 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2051 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2052 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2053 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2055 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2057 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2058 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2059 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2060 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2061 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2065 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2069 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2070 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2072 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2073 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2075 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2076 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2077 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2079 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2080 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2083 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2087 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2088 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2089 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2091 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2092 to accommodate leap seconds.
2093 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2095 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2096 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2097 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2099 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2101 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2102 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2103 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2105 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2106 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2107 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2108 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2109 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2113 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2114 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2115 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2116 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2118 ** Changes in behavior
2120 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2121 environment variable is set.
2123 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2124 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2125 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2129 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2130 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2131 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2132 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2134 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2135 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2136 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2137 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2141 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2142 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2143 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2145 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2146 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2147 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2148 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2149 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2150 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2151 another improvement:
2153 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2154 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2157 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2161 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2162 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2163 and libraries tested at configure time.
2164 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2166 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2167 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2169 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2170 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2172 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2173 printing a summary to stderr.
2174 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2176 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2177 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2178 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2180 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2181 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2183 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2184 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2185 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2186 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2188 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2189 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2190 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2191 which is relatively unusual.
2192 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2194 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2195 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2196 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2197 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2198 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2199 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2200 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2204 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2205 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2206 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2207 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2208 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2212 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2213 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2215 ** Changes in behavior
2217 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2218 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2219 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2220 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2221 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2224 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2228 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2229 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2231 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2232 before data copying has started.
2234 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2235 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2237 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2238 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2239 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2240 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2242 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2243 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2244 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2245 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2247 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2252 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2253 for its standard streams.
2255 ** Changes in behavior
2257 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2258 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2259 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2260 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2261 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2262 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2264 ** Deprecated options
2266 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2267 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2271 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2273 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2274 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2275 a btrfs file system.
2277 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2279 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2280 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2282 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2283 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2286 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2290 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2291 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2292 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2293 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2295 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2296 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2297 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2298 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2299 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2304 make check: two tests have been corrected
2308 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2309 inherited from gnulib.
2312 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2316 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2317 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2318 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2319 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2321 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2322 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2324 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2326 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2327 systems without xattr support.
2329 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2330 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2331 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2333 ** Changes in behavior
2335 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2336 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2337 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2338 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2340 ** Improved robustness
2342 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2343 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2344 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2345 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2346 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2347 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2348 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2349 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2350 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2354 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2355 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2357 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2358 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2359 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2360 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2361 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2364 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2368 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2369 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2370 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2374 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2375 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2376 data was read, or on process exit.
2377 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2379 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2380 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2381 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2382 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2384 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2385 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2386 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2387 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2389 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2390 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2392 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2393 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2395 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2396 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2397 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2399 ** Changes in behavior
2401 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2402 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2403 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2405 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2406 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2408 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2409 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2410 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2413 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2417 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2419 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2420 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2421 install: Never copies xattrs
2423 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2424 from overwriting any existing destination file
2426 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2427 mode where this feature is available.
2429 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2430 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2431 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2432 do not modify the destination at all.
2434 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2436 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2440 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2441 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2443 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2445 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2446 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2448 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2449 processing the first file name
2451 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2452 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2453 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2454 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2456 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2457 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2459 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2460 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2463 ** Changes in behavior
2465 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2466 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2468 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2469 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2470 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2472 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2473 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2475 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2477 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2478 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2479 is still marked with a '+'.
2482 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2486 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2487 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2491 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2492 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2493 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2494 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2495 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2496 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2498 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2499 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2501 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2502 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2504 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2506 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2507 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2508 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2510 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2511 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2513 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2514 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2515 used to factor large numbers.
2517 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2520 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2522 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2524 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2525 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2527 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2528 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2529 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2530 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2532 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2533 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2534 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2536 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2537 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2541 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2543 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2544 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2546 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2547 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2549 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2551 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2552 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2556 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2557 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2558 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2560 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2562 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2563 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2564 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2566 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2567 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2568 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2570 ** Changes in behavior
2572 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2573 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2576 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2580 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2581 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2582 'futimens' system calls.
2586 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2588 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2589 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2590 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2592 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2593 with no USERNAME argument.
2595 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2596 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2597 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2599 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2600 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2601 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2602 number of fields for some inputs.
2604 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2605 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2607 ** Changes in behavior
2609 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2610 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2613 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2617 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2619 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2620 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2621 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2622 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2624 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2625 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2627 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2628 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2630 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2631 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2633 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2634 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2635 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2636 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2638 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2639 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2640 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2641 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2642 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2643 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2645 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2646 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2648 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2649 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2650 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2652 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2653 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2655 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2656 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2658 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2659 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2660 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2661 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2663 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2664 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2666 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2667 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2669 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2670 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2671 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2675 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2676 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2678 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2679 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2680 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2681 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2685 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2686 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2688 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2690 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2694 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2695 which have negative errno values.
2699 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2703 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2707 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2708 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2711 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2715 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2716 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2717 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2719 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2720 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2721 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2722 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2726 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2727 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2728 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2729 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2732 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2736 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2738 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2739 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2740 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2743 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2747 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2748 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2750 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2752 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2754 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2756 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2760 ** Changes in behavior
2762 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2763 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2765 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2766 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2768 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2769 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2770 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2774 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2775 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2776 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2777 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2778 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2779 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2780 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2781 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2782 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2783 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2784 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2786 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2787 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2788 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2791 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2794 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2795 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2796 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2798 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2799 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2800 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2803 ** New build options
2805 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2806 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2807 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2808 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2810 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2811 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2812 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2813 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2814 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2815 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2816 of "make check" fail.
2818 ** Remove deprecated options
2820 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2821 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2822 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2823 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2824 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2826 ** Improved robustness
2828 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2829 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2830 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2831 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2832 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2833 loss of the contents of a/f.
2835 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2836 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2840 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2841 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2842 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2844 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2845 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2846 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2847 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2849 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2850 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2851 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2852 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2853 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2854 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2855 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2856 destination is a symlink.
2858 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2860 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2861 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2863 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2864 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2866 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2868 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2869 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2871 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2872 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2874 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2877 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2878 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2880 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2881 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2883 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2884 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2885 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2886 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2888 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2889 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2890 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2892 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2893 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2894 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2896 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2897 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2898 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2899 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2901 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2902 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2903 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2905 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2906 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2908 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2909 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2911 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2913 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2914 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2915 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2917 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2918 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2920 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2921 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2923 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2924 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2926 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2927 [present in the original version]
2930 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2934 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2936 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2937 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2938 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2940 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2941 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2943 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2947 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2948 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2950 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2951 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2953 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2954 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2956 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2957 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2958 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2959 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2960 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2961 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2963 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2964 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2967 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2968 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2970 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2973 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2974 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2975 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2977 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2978 directory is unreadable.
2980 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2981 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2982 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2984 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2985 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2986 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2987 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2988 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2991 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2992 Before it would print nothing.
2994 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2996 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2997 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2998 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2999 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3000 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3001 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3002 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3003 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3005 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3009 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3010 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3011 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3013 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3014 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3015 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3016 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3019 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3023 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3024 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3025 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3026 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3027 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3028 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3029 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3031 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3032 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3033 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3034 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3035 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3036 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3037 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3038 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3040 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3041 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3042 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3045 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3049 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3050 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3052 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3053 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3054 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3056 ** Improved robustness
3058 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3059 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3060 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3063 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3067 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3068 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3069 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3070 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3071 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3073 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3077 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3080 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3084 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3085 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3086 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3087 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3089 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3090 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3092 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3093 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3094 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3097 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3099 ** Improved robustness
3101 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3102 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3104 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3105 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3106 or NFS-mounted partition.
3108 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3109 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3113 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3114 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3115 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3116 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3117 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3118 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3120 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3121 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3123 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3124 or neglect to report file removal.
3126 For the "groups" command:
3128 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3129 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3131 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3133 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3135 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3139 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3140 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3143 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3145 ** Changes in behavior
3147 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3148 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3149 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3150 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3152 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3153 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3154 a final './' or '../' component.
3156 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3157 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3158 this only for pipes.
3160 ** Infrastructure changes
3162 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3163 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3164 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3165 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3169 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3170 name is "." or "..".
3172 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3173 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3174 dirent.d_type support.
3176 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3177 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3179 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3180 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3181 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3182 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3185 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3187 ** Changes in behavior
3189 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3193 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3194 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3198 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3199 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3200 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3202 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3203 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3205 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3206 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3208 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3210 ** Improved robustness
3212 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3213 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3214 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3216 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3217 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3220 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3221 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3223 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3224 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3226 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3227 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3229 ** Changes in behavior
3231 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3232 where the two are distinct.
3234 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3235 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3236 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3237 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3238 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3239 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3240 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3241 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3242 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3243 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3244 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3245 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3246 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3247 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3248 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3249 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3250 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3252 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3253 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3254 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3256 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3257 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3258 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3259 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3262 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3263 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3267 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3268 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3269 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3270 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3272 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3273 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3274 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3276 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3277 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3278 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3279 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3280 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3283 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3284 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3286 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3287 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3288 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3289 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3291 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3292 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3293 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3295 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3296 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3297 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3298 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3300 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3301 and sticky) with the -m option.
3303 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3304 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3305 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3306 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3307 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3309 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3310 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3312 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3316 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3317 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3318 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3319 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3321 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3323 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3325 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3326 silently ignoring one of them.
3328 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3329 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3330 containing this change was 5.92.
3332 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3333 automatically newline terminated.
3335 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3336 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3337 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3338 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3341 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3342 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3343 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3346 ** Scheduled for removal
3348 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3349 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3351 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3352 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3353 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3354 command to unlink a directory.
3356 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3357 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3358 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3359 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3363 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3364 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3365 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3366 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3367 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3368 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3372 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3373 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3375 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3377 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3378 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3379 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3381 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3382 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3385 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3386 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3388 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3389 list directories before files.
3391 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3392 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3393 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3394 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3397 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3399 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3401 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3402 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3403 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3405 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3406 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3410 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3411 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3412 usually printing nothing.
3414 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3416 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3417 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3418 them with hard-linked directories.
3420 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3421 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3422 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3424 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3425 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3426 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3428 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3431 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3432 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3434 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3435 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3437 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3438 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3440 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3441 all command-line arguments.
3443 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3445 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3447 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3448 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3450 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3452 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3453 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3454 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3455 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3456 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3458 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3459 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3461 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3462 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3463 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3464 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3466 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3468 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3472 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3473 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3475 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3476 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3478 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3479 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3481 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3482 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3484 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3485 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3487 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3489 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3490 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3491 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3494 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3496 ** Build-related bug fixes
3498 installing .mo files would fail
3501 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3505 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3507 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3510 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3514 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3515 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3519 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3521 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3522 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3524 ** Deprecated options
3526 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3527 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3529 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3533 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3535 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3536 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3537 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3538 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3540 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3543 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3549 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3554 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3556 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3558 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3559 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3560 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3562 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3563 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3564 problematic usages. These include:
3566 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3567 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3568 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3569 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3570 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3571 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3572 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3573 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3574 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3576 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3577 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3579 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3580 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3581 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3582 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3584 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3585 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3586 between binary and text files.
3588 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3592 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3596 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3597 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3599 head tac tail tee tr
3600 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3602 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3603 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3605 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3606 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3607 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3609 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3611 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3613 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3614 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3615 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3619 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3621 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3622 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3624 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3625 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3626 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3630 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3631 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3635 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3636 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3637 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3641 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3642 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3646 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3648 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3650 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3654 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3655 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3656 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3658 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3659 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3660 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3661 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3662 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3664 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3668 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3669 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3670 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3672 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3674 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3675 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3676 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3677 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3679 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3681 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3682 rather than silently wrapping around.
3684 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3685 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3687 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3688 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3690 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3691 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3692 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3693 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3695 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3697 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3699 ** Improved robustness
3701 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3702 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3703 no matter how large the result.
3705 ** Improved portability
3707 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3708 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3710 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3712 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3713 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3714 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3716 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3717 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3721 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3722 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3724 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3726 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3727 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3728 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3729 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3731 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3732 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3734 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3735 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3736 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3738 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3740 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3741 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3743 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3744 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3746 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3748 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3749 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3751 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3752 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3754 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3755 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3756 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3758 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3760 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3762 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3766 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3768 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3769 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3770 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3772 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3773 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3775 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3776 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3777 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3779 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3780 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3782 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3783 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3784 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3785 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3787 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3788 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3790 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3791 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3792 the file system does not support it.
3794 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3796 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3797 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3799 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3801 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3802 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3804 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3805 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3806 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3807 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3809 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3810 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3813 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3814 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3815 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3816 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3818 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3819 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3820 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3821 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3823 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3824 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3826 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3828 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3829 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3830 reporting incorrect results.
3834 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3835 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3837 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3840 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3842 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3843 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3845 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3846 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3848 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3851 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3852 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3853 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3854 the file name does not look like a page range.
3856 printf has several changes:
3858 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3859 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3861 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3862 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3863 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3865 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3866 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3869 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3870 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3872 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3873 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3875 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3877 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3878 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3880 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3882 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3884 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3885 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3886 when first encountering the directory.
3890 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3891 output; POSIX requires this.
3893 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3894 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3896 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3898 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3899 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3901 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3902 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3904 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3905 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3906 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3907 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3908 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3909 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3910 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3912 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3913 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3914 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3916 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3917 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3919 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3921 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3923 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3924 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3925 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3926 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3928 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3932 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3933 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3934 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3935 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3936 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3938 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3939 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3940 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3942 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3943 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3945 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3946 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3948 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3949 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
3950 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
3951 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3952 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
3954 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3955 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3957 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3958 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3960 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3962 nocreat do not create the output file
3963 excl fail if the output file already exists
3964 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3965 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3967 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3969 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3970 direct use direct I/O for data
3971 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3972 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3973 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3974 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3975 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3977 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3979 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3980 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3983 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3984 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3985 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3986 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3987 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3988 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3990 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3991 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3993 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3996 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3998 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4000 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4001 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4003 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4004 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4005 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4007 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4008 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4009 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4011 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4013 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4014 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4016 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4017 for compatibility with bash.
4019 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4021 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4022 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4023 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4024 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4026 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4027 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4029 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4030 ls supports TABSIZE.
4031 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4032 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4033 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4035 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4038 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4040 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4041 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4042 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4043 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4044 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4045 an offset, not as a file name.
4047 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4048 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4050 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4051 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4053 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4054 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4056 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4057 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4058 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4060 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4061 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4063 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4064 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4068 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4070 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4072 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4076 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4077 or more arguments between partitions.
4079 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4080 holes in the destination.
4082 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4083 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4084 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4085 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4086 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4087 terminates immediately.
4089 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4091 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4093 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4094 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4095 not the empty string.
4097 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4098 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4102 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4103 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4104 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4107 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4114 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4118 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4119 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4121 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4122 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4124 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4125 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4126 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4129 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4133 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4134 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4136 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4137 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4139 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4140 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4141 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4143 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4145 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4148 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4150 ** Configuration option
4152 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4153 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4157 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4158 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4162 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4163 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4164 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4167 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4168 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4169 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4170 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4171 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4172 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4173 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4176 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4180 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4181 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4182 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4184 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4185 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4187 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4189 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4190 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4191 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4192 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4194 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4196 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4197 not just the ones that reference directories
4199 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4200 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4202 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4203 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4204 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4206 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4207 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4208 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4209 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4210 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4211 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4213 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4218 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4219 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4221 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4223 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4225 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4227 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4228 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4230 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4231 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4233 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4235 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4239 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4241 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4243 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4244 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4245 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4246 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4247 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4249 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4250 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4252 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4253 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4255 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4256 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4258 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4259 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4260 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4264 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4265 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4266 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4267 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4268 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4269 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4270 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4271 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4272 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4273 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4274 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4275 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4276 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4277 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4279 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4281 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4282 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4284 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4286 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4288 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4289 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4291 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4293 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4294 without a trailing newline.
4296 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4297 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4299 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4302 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4306 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4308 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4310 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4311 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4312 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4313 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4315 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4317 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4318 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4319 be printed without leading spaces.
4321 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4322 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4327 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4328 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4329 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4331 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4333 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4334 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4336 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4337 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4339 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4340 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4342 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4344 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4346 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4348 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4349 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4351 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4353 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4355 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4356 byte offsets are specified.
4359 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4362 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4365 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4366 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4367 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4368 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4369 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4370 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4371 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4372 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4373 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4374 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4375 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4376 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4377 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4378 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4379 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4380 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4381 directory where M has write access.
4382 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4383 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4384 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4387 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4388 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4389 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4390 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4391 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4392 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4393 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4394 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4395 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4396 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4397 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4398 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4399 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4400 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4401 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4402 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4403 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4404 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4405 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4406 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4407 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4408 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4409 appeared one additional time.
4411 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4412 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4413 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4414 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4417 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4418 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4419 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4420 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4421 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4422 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4423 if there were more than 338.
4425 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4426 - false --help now exits nonzero
4429 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4430 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4431 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4432 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4435 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4436 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4437 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4438 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4439 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4442 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4443 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4444 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4445 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4446 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4447 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4448 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4451 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4452 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4453 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4454 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4455 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4456 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4458 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4459 under certain unusual conditions
4460 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4461 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4464 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4465 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4466 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4467 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4468 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4469 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4470 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4471 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4472 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4473 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4474 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4475 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4476 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4477 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4478 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4479 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4482 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4483 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4486 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4487 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4488 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4489 involving hard-linked directories
4490 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4491 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4492 character-special and block files
4495 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4496 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4497 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4498 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4499 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4500 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4501 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4502 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4503 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4505 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4506 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4507 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4508 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4509 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4510 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4511 specified on the command line.
4512 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4513 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4514 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4515 the first file untouched.
4516 * readlink: new program
4517 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4518 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4519 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4520 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4521 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4522 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4525 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4526 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4527 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4528 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4529 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4530 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4531 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4532 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4533 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4534 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4535 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4536 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4538 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4539 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4540 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4542 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4543 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4544 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4545 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4546 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4547 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4548 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4549 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4552 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4553 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4556 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4557 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4558 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4559 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4560 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4561 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4562 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4565 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4566 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4568 ========================================================================
4569 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4570 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4573 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4575 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4576 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4577 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4578 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4579 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4580 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4581 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4582 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4583 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4584 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4585 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4586 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4588 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4589 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4590 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4591 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4593 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4596 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4598 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4599 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4600 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4601 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4602 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4603 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4604 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4607 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4608 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4609 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4610 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4611 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4612 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4613 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4614 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4615 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4616 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4617 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4618 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4619 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4620 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4621 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4622 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4624 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4625 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4627 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4628 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4629 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4630 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4631 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4632 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4634 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4635 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4636 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4637 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4638 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4639 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4640 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4642 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4643 the source files in the following example:
4644 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4645 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4646 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4647 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4648 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4649 links between source files with --preserve=links
4650 * cp accepts new options:
4651 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4652 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4653 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4654 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4655 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4656 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4657 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4658 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4659 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4661 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4662 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4663 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4664 even though it's older than dest.
4665 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4666 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4667 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4668 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4669 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4671 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4672 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4673 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4674 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4675 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4676 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4677 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4679 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4680 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4681 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4683 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4684 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4685 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4686 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4687 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4688 This is the default.
4690 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4691 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4692 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4693 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4694 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4696 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4699 ========================================================================
4700 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4701 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4704 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4705 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4707 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4708 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4709 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4710 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4711 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4713 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4714 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4715 that specifies a non-directory
4718 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4719 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4720 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4721 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4722 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4723 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4724 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4725 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4726 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4727 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4728 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4729 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4730 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4731 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4732 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4733 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4734 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4735 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4736 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4737 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4738 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4739 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4740 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4741 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4743 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4744 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4745 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4747 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4749 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4750 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4752 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4753 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4754 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4755 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4756 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4758 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4759 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4760 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4761 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4762 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4764 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4766 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4767 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4768 * still more portability fixes
4769 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4770 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4772 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4774 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4776 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4778 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4779 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4780 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4781 there is any time remaining
4782 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4784 ========================================================================
4785 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4786 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4788 This package began as the union of the following:
4789 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4791 ========================================================================
4793 Copyright (C) 2001-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4795 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4796 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4797 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4798 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4799 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4800 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.