1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
8 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
11 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
12 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
14 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
16 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
17 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
18 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
20 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
21 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
22 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
24 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
25 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
26 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
27 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
29 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
30 from the source, when copying across file systems.
31 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
33 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
34 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
35 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
37 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
38 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
40 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
41 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
42 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
43 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
45 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
46 would immediately exit when such a file is inaccessible during the initial
48 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
52 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
53 command line argument through to the output.
55 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
58 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
59 a NUL instead of a white space character.
61 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
62 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
64 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
66 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
67 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
68 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
70 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
71 unique groups with empty lines.
73 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
74 used to identify the split points.
76 shuf accepts a new option: --repetitions (-r), to allow repetitions
77 of input items in the permuted output.
79 ** Changes in behavior
81 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
82 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
83 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
84 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
86 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
87 not just the transfer counts.
89 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
90 as per the documented interface.
94 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
96 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
97 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
98 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
99 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
101 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
102 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
103 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
105 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
106 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
108 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
109 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
111 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
115 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
118 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
122 numfmt: reformat numbers
126 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
127 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
128 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
130 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
131 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
132 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
136 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
137 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
139 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
140 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
143 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
144 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
145 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
147 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
148 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
149 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
151 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
152 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
153 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
155 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
156 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
157 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
159 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
160 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
162 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
163 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
165 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
166 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
167 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
169 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
170 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
171 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
173 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
174 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
175 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
177 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
178 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
179 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
180 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
182 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
183 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
184 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
186 ** Changes in behavior
188 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
189 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
190 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
191 'total' in the target column.
193 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
194 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
195 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
197 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
198 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
202 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
203 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
205 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
206 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
208 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
212 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
213 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
214 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
215 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
216 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
217 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
218 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
219 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
220 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
221 for a patched distribution package.
223 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
224 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
226 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
227 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
228 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
229 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
232 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
236 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
238 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
239 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
240 sha384sum and sha512sum.
244 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
245 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
246 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
247 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
250 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
251 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
253 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
254 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
255 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
256 eventually exits nonzero.
258 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
259 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
260 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
261 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
262 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
264 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
265 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
268 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
269 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
270 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
272 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
273 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
274 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
276 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
277 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
278 Before, this would infloop:
279 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
280 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
282 ** Changes in behavior
284 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
288 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
289 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
290 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
291 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
292 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
295 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
296 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
297 format-changing options.
299 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
300 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
301 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
302 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
303 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
307 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
308 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
309 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
310 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
311 are run without following the instructions in README.
313 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
314 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
315 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
316 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
317 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
318 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
319 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
322 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
326 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
327 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
328 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
329 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
331 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
332 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
333 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
334 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
336 sort -u could read freed memory.
337 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
338 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
339 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
343 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
344 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
345 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
346 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
349 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
353 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
354 processes will not intersperse their output.
355 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
357 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
358 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
359 date: invalid date '\260'
360 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
362 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
363 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
364 lines output by df, can work reliably.
365 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
367 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
368 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
369 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
371 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
372 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
373 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
374 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
375 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
376 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
378 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
379 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
381 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
382 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
384 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
385 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
386 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
388 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
389 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
390 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
394 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
396 ** Changes in behavior
398 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
399 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
400 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
401 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
402 have any reason to include it here.
406 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
407 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
408 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
410 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
411 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
412 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
415 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
419 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
420 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
421 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
422 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
423 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
424 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
426 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
427 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
428 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
429 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
430 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
431 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
432 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
434 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
435 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
437 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
438 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
442 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
443 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
445 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
447 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
449 ** Changes in behavior
451 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
452 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
453 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
455 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
456 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
459 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
463 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
464 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
465 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
466 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
467 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
468 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
469 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
470 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
472 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
473 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
474 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
475 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
476 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
478 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
479 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
481 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
482 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
484 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
485 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
487 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
488 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
490 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
491 additional static suffix to output file names.
493 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
494 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
495 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
497 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
498 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
502 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
503 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
504 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
506 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
507 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
508 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
509 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
510 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
511 typically still point to one of the hard links.
513 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
514 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
515 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
516 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
517 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
519 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
520 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
521 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
522 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
526 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
527 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
528 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
530 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
531 instead of causing a usage failure.
533 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
536 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
540 realpath: print resolved file names.
544 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
545 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
547 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
550 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
551 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
552 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
553 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
554 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
557 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
558 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
559 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
561 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
562 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
563 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
565 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
566 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
567 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
568 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
569 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
571 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
573 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
574 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
576 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
577 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
578 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
580 ** Changes in behavior
582 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
583 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
584 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
585 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
586 usually-short referent instead.
588 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
589 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
590 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
591 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
594 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
598 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
599 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
600 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
602 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
603 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
605 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
606 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
610 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
611 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
613 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
614 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
615 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
616 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
618 ** Changes in behavior
620 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
621 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
622 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
626 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
627 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
628 only .tar.xz files is enough.
631 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
635 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
636 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
637 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
639 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
640 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
642 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
643 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
644 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
645 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
646 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
648 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
649 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
650 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
651 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
652 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
653 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
654 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
655 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
657 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
658 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
660 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
661 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
663 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
664 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
666 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
667 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
668 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
670 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
671 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
672 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
673 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
675 ** Changes in behavior
677 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
678 when -v or -c specified.
680 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
681 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
685 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
686 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
687 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
688 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
689 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
691 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
692 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
693 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
695 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
696 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
697 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
698 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
699 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
700 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
701 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
703 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
704 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
705 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
709 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
710 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
712 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
715 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
716 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
718 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
719 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
721 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
722 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
724 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
726 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
730 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
731 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
733 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
736 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
740 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
741 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
743 ** Changes in behavior
745 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
746 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
747 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
748 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
749 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
750 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
752 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
753 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
754 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
758 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
761 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
765 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
766 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
767 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
769 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
770 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
771 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
773 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
774 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
775 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
777 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
778 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
780 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
781 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
783 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
784 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
786 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
787 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
791 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
792 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
793 processed portion thereof.
795 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
796 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
798 ** Changes in behavior
800 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
801 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
802 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
804 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
805 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
806 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
808 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
809 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
811 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
812 Use --preserve-context instead.
814 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
817 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
821 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
822 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
823 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
824 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
825 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
827 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
828 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
830 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
831 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
832 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
834 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
835 reject file names invalid for that file system.
837 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
838 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
842 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
843 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
844 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
845 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
846 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
847 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
848 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
849 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
851 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
852 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
853 the same number of fields are output for each line.
855 ** Changes in behavior
857 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
858 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
859 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
862 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
866 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
867 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
868 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
871 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
875 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
876 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
878 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
879 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
881 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
882 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
884 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
885 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
886 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
887 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
889 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
890 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
892 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
893 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
894 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
896 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
898 ** Changes in behavior
900 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
901 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
902 to the number of available processors.
906 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
909 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
913 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
914 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
915 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
916 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
918 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
919 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
920 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
922 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
923 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
925 ** Changes in behavior
927 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
928 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
930 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
931 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
932 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
933 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
934 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
935 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
937 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
938 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
939 the same way as the others.
941 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
942 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
945 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
949 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
950 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
951 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
953 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
954 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
956 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
957 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
958 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
960 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
961 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
963 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
964 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
966 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
967 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
968 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
970 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
971 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
972 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
973 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
977 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
978 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
980 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
983 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
984 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
986 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
988 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
989 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
990 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
992 ** Changes in behavior
994 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
995 rather than its aliased target.
997 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
998 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
999 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1001 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1002 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1003 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1004 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1005 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1006 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1007 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1008 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1010 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1012 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1014 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1015 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1018 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1019 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1020 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1021 control like taskset for example.
1023 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1025 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1026 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1027 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1028 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1029 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1030 includes %C when context information is available.
1032 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1033 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1034 rather than a file system attribute.
1036 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1037 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1038 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1039 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1041 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1042 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1043 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1045 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1046 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1047 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1050 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1054 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1055 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1057 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1059 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1060 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1062 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1063 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1064 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1065 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1067 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1068 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1069 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1073 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1074 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1076 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1077 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1078 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1080 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1081 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1082 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1083 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1084 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1085 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1086 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1087 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1088 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1090 ** Changes in behavior
1092 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1093 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1095 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1096 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1099 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1103 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1104 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1105 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1110 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1111 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1113 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1114 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1115 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1116 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1118 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1119 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1120 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1123 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1127 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1128 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1129 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1131 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1132 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1133 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1135 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1136 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1138 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1139 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1140 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1143 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1144 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1145 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1147 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1148 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1149 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1150 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1152 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1153 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1154 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1156 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1157 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1158 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1159 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1161 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1162 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1165 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1166 processes will not intersperse their output.
1167 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1170 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1174 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1175 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1177 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1178 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1180 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1181 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1182 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1183 the presence of the empty string argument.
1184 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1186 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1187 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1188 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1189 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1191 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1192 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1194 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1195 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1196 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1198 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1199 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1200 and with a malicious user on the same system
1201 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1202 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1205 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1209 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1210 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1211 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1213 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1214 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1215 offending directory and all "contents."
1217 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1218 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1219 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1221 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1222 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1223 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1225 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1226 processes will not intersperse their output.
1227 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1228 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1230 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1231 output the name of the file to stdout.
1232 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1234 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1235 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1236 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1238 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1239 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1242 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1243 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1244 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1246 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1247 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1248 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1249 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1250 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1251 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1253 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1254 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1255 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1256 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1258 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1259 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1261 ** Changes in behavior
1263 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1264 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1265 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1266 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1267 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1269 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1270 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1271 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1272 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1274 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1276 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1277 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1278 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1279 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1280 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1284 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1288 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1289 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1291 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1292 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1294 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1295 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1296 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1298 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1299 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1302 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1306 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1307 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1308 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1310 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1311 to accommodate leap seconds.
1312 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1314 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1315 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1316 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1318 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1320 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1321 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1322 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1324 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1325 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1326 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1327 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1328 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1332 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1333 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1334 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1335 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1337 ** Changes in behavior
1339 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1340 environment variable is set.
1342 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1343 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1344 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1348 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1349 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1350 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1351 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1353 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1354 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1355 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1356 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1360 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1361 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1362 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1364 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1365 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1366 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1367 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1368 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1369 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1370 another improvement:
1372 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1373 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1376 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1380 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1381 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1382 and libraries tested at configure time.
1383 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1385 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1386 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1388 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1389 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1391 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1392 printing a summary to stderr.
1393 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1395 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1396 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1397 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1399 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1400 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1402 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1403 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1404 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1405 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1407 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1408 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1409 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1410 which is relatively unusual.
1411 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1413 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1414 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1415 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1416 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1417 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1418 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1419 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1423 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1424 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1425 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1426 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1427 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1431 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1432 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1434 ** Changes in behavior
1436 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1437 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1438 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1439 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1440 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1443 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1447 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1448 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1450 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1451 before data copying has started.
1453 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1454 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1456 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1457 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1458 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1459 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1461 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1462 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1463 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1464 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1466 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1471 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1472 for its standard streams.
1474 ** Changes in behavior
1476 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1477 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1478 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1479 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1480 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1481 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1483 ** Deprecated options
1485 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1486 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1490 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1492 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1493 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1494 a btrfs file system.
1496 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1498 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1499 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1501 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1502 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1505 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1509 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1510 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1511 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1512 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1514 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1515 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1516 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1517 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1518 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1523 make check: two tests have been corrected
1527 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1528 inherited from gnulib.
1531 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1535 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1536 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1537 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1538 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1540 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1541 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1543 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1545 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1546 systems without xattr support.
1548 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1549 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1550 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1552 ** Changes in behavior
1554 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1555 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1556 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1557 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1559 ** Improved robustness
1561 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1562 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1563 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1564 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1565 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1566 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1567 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1568 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1569 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1573 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1574 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1576 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1577 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1578 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1579 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1580 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1583 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1587 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1588 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1589 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1593 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1594 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1595 data was read, or on process exit.
1596 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1598 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1599 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1600 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1601 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1603 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1604 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1605 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1606 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1608 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1609 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1611 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1612 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1614 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1615 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1616 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1618 ** Changes in behavior
1620 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1621 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1622 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1624 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1625 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1627 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1628 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1629 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1632 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1636 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1638 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1639 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1640 install: Never copies xattrs
1642 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1643 from overwriting any existing destination file
1645 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1646 mode where this feature is available.
1648 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1649 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1650 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1651 do not modify the destination at all.
1653 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1655 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1659 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1660 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1662 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1664 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1665 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1667 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1668 processing the first file name
1670 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1671 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1672 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1673 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1675 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1676 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1678 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1679 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1682 ** Changes in behavior
1684 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1685 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1687 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1688 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1689 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1691 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1692 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1694 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1696 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1697 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1698 is still marked with a '+'.
1701 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1705 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1706 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1710 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1711 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1712 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1713 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1714 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1715 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1717 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1718 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1720 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1721 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1723 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1725 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1726 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1727 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1729 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1730 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1732 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1733 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1734 used to factor large numbers.
1736 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1739 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1741 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1743 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1744 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1746 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1747 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1748 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1749 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1751 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1752 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1753 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1755 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1756 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1760 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1762 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1763 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1765 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1766 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1768 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1770 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1771 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1775 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1776 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1777 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1779 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1781 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1782 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1783 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1785 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1786 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1787 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1789 ** Changes in behavior
1791 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1792 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1795 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1799 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1800 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1801 'futimens' system calls.
1805 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1807 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1808 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1809 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1811 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1812 with no USERNAME argument.
1814 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1815 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1816 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1818 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1819 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1820 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1821 number of fields for some inputs.
1823 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1824 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1826 ** Changes in behavior
1828 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1829 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1832 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1836 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1838 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1839 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1840 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1841 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1843 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1844 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1846 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1847 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1849 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1850 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1852 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1853 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1854 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1855 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1857 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1858 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1859 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1860 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1861 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1862 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1864 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1865 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1867 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1868 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1869 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1871 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1872 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1874 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1875 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1877 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1878 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1879 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1880 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1882 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1883 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1885 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1886 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1888 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1889 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1890 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1894 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1895 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1897 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1898 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1899 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1900 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1904 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1905 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1907 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1909 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1913 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1914 which have negative errno values.
1918 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1922 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1926 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1927 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1930 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1934 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1935 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1936 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1938 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1939 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1940 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1941 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1945 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1946 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1947 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1948 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1951 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1955 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1957 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1958 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1959 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1962 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1966 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1967 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1969 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1971 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1973 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1975 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1979 ** Changes in behavior
1981 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1982 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1984 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1985 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1987 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1988 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1989 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1993 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1994 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1995 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1996 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1997 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1998 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1999 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2000 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2001 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2002 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2003 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2005 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2006 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2007 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2010 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2013 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2014 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2015 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2017 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2018 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2019 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2022 ** New build options
2024 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2025 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2026 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2027 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2029 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2030 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2031 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2032 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2033 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2034 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2035 of "make check" fail.
2037 ** Remove deprecated options
2039 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2040 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2041 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2042 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2043 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2045 ** Improved robustness
2047 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2048 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2049 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2050 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2051 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2052 loss of the contents of a/f.
2054 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2055 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2059 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2060 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2061 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2063 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2064 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2065 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2066 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2068 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2069 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2070 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2071 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2072 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2073 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2074 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2075 destination is a symlink.
2077 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2079 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2080 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2082 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2083 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2085 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2087 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2088 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2090 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2091 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2093 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2096 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2097 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2099 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2100 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2102 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2103 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2104 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2105 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2107 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2108 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2109 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2111 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2112 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2113 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2115 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2116 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2117 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2118 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2120 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2121 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2122 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2124 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2125 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2127 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2128 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2130 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2132 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2133 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2134 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2136 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2137 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2139 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2140 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2142 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2143 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2145 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2146 [present in the original version]
2149 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2153 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2155 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2156 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2157 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2159 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2160 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2162 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2166 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2167 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2169 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2170 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2172 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2173 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2175 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2176 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2177 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2178 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2179 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2180 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2182 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2183 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2186 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2187 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2189 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2192 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2193 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2194 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2196 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2197 directory is unreadable.
2199 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2200 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2201 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2203 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2204 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2205 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2206 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2207 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2210 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2211 Before it would print nothing.
2213 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2215 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2216 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2217 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2218 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2219 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2220 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2221 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2222 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2224 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2228 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2229 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2230 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2232 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2233 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2234 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2235 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2238 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2242 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2243 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2244 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2245 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2246 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2247 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2248 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2250 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2251 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2252 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2253 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2254 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2255 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2256 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2257 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2259 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2260 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2261 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2264 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2268 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2269 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2271 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2272 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2273 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2275 ** Improved robustness
2277 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2278 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2279 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2282 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2286 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2287 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2288 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2289 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2290 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2292 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2296 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2299 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2303 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2304 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2305 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2306 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2308 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2309 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2311 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2312 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2313 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2316 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2318 ** Improved robustness
2320 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2321 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2323 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2324 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2325 or NFS-mounted partition.
2327 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2328 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2332 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2333 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2334 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2335 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2336 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2337 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2339 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2340 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2342 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2343 or neglect to report file removal.
2345 For the "groups" command:
2347 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2348 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2350 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2352 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2354 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2358 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2359 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2362 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2364 ** Changes in behavior
2366 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2367 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2368 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2369 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2371 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2372 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2373 a final './' or '../' component.
2375 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2376 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2377 this only for pipes.
2379 ** Infrastructure changes
2381 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2382 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2383 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2384 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2388 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2389 name is "." or "..".
2391 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2392 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2393 dirent.d_type support.
2395 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2396 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2398 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2399 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2400 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2401 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2404 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2406 ** Changes in behavior
2408 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2412 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2413 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2417 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2418 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2419 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2421 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2422 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2424 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2425 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2427 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2429 ** Improved robustness
2431 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2432 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2433 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2435 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2436 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2439 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2440 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2442 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2443 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2445 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2446 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2448 ** Changes in behavior
2450 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2451 where the two are distinct.
2453 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2454 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2455 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2456 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2457 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2458 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2459 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2460 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2461 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2462 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2463 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2464 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2465 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2466 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2467 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2468 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2469 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2471 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2472 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2473 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2475 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2476 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2477 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2478 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2481 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2482 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2486 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2487 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2488 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2489 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2491 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2492 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2493 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2495 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2496 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2497 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2498 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2499 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2502 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2503 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2505 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2506 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2507 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2508 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2510 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2511 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2512 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2514 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2515 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2516 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2517 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2519 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2520 and sticky) with the -m option.
2522 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2523 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2524 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2525 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2526 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2528 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2529 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2531 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2535 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2536 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2537 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2538 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2540 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2542 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2544 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2545 silently ignoring one of them.
2547 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2548 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2549 containing this change was 5.92.
2551 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2552 automatically newline terminated.
2554 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2555 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2556 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2557 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2560 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2561 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2562 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2565 ** Scheduled for removal
2567 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2568 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2570 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2571 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2572 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2573 command to unlink a directory.
2575 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2576 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2577 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2578 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2582 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2583 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2584 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2585 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2586 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2587 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2591 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2592 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2594 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2596 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2597 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2598 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2600 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2601 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2604 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2605 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2607 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2608 list directories before files.
2610 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2611 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2612 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2613 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2616 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2618 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2620 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2621 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2622 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2624 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2625 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2629 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2630 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2631 usually printing nothing.
2633 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2635 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2636 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2637 them with hard-linked directories.
2639 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2640 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2641 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2643 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2644 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2645 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2647 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2650 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2651 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2653 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2654 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2656 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2657 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2659 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2660 all command-line arguments.
2662 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2664 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2666 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2667 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2669 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2671 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2672 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2673 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2674 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2675 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2677 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2678 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2680 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2681 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2682 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2683 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2685 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2687 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2691 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2692 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2694 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2695 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2697 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2698 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2700 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2701 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2703 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2704 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2706 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2708 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2709 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2710 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2713 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2715 ** Build-related bug fixes
2717 installing .mo files would fail
2720 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2724 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2726 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2729 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2733 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2734 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2738 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2740 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2741 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2743 ** Deprecated options
2745 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2746 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2748 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2752 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2754 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2755 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2756 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2757 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2759 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2762 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2768 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2773 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2775 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2777 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2778 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2779 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2781 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2782 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2783 problematic usages. These include:
2785 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2786 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2787 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2788 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2789 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2790 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2791 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2792 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2793 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2795 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2796 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2798 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2799 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2800 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2801 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2803 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2804 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2805 between binary and text files.
2807 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2811 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2815 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2816 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2818 head tac tail tee tr
2819 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2821 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2822 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2824 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2825 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2826 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2828 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2830 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2832 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2833 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2834 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2838 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2840 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2841 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2843 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2844 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2845 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2849 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2850 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2854 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2855 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2856 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2860 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2861 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2865 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2867 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2869 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2873 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2874 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2875 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2877 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2878 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2879 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2880 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2881 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2883 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2887 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2888 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2889 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2891 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2893 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2894 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2895 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2896 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2898 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2900 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2901 rather than silently wrapping around.
2903 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2904 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2906 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2907 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2909 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2910 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2911 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2912 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2914 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2916 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2918 ** Improved robustness
2920 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2921 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2922 no matter how large the result.
2924 ** Improved portability
2926 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2927 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2929 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2931 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2932 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2933 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2935 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2936 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2940 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2941 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2943 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2945 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2946 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2947 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2948 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2950 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2951 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2953 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2954 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2955 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2957 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2959 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2960 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2962 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2963 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2965 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2967 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2968 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2970 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2971 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2973 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2974 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2975 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2977 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2979 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2981 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2985 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2987 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2988 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2989 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2991 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2992 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2994 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2995 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2996 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2998 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2999 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3001 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3002 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3003 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3004 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3006 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3007 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3009 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3010 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3011 the file system does not support it.
3013 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3015 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3016 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3018 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3020 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3021 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3023 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3024 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3025 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3026 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3028 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3029 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3032 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3033 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3034 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3035 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3037 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3038 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3039 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3040 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3042 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3043 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3045 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3047 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3048 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3049 reporting incorrect results.
3053 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3054 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3056 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3059 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3061 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3062 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3064 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3065 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3067 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3070 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3071 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3072 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3073 the file name does not look like a page range.
3075 printf has several changes:
3077 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3078 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3080 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3081 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3082 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3084 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3085 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3088 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3089 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3091 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3092 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3094 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3096 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3097 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3099 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3101 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3103 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3104 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3105 when first encountering the directory.
3109 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3110 output; POSIX requires this.
3112 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3113 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3115 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3117 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3118 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3120 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3121 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3123 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3124 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3125 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3126 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3127 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3128 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3129 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3131 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3132 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3133 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3135 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3136 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3138 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3140 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3142 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3143 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3144 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3145 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3147 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3151 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3152 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3153 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3154 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3155 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3157 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3158 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3159 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3161 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3162 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3164 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3165 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3167 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3168 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3169 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3170 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3171 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3173 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3174 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3176 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3177 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3179 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3181 nocreat do not create the output file
3182 excl fail if the output file already exists
3183 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3184 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3186 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3188 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3189 direct use direct I/O for data
3190 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3191 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3192 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3193 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3194 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3196 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3198 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3199 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3202 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3203 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3204 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3205 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3206 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3207 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3209 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3210 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3212 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3215 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3217 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3219 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3220 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3222 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3223 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3224 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3226 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3227 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3228 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3230 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3232 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3233 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3235 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3236 for compatibility with bash.
3238 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3240 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3241 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3242 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3243 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3245 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3246 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3248 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3249 ls supports TABSIZE.
3250 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3251 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3252 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3254 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3257 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3259 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3260 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3261 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3262 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3263 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3264 an offset, not as a file name.
3266 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3267 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3269 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3270 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3272 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3273 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3275 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3276 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3277 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3279 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3280 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3282 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3283 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3287 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3289 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3291 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3295 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3296 or more arguments between partitions.
3298 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3299 holes in the destination.
3301 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3302 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3303 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3304 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3305 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3306 terminates immediately.
3308 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3310 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3312 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3313 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3314 not the empty string.
3316 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3317 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3321 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3322 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3323 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3326 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3333 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3337 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3338 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3340 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3341 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3343 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3344 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3345 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3348 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3352 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3353 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3355 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3356 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3358 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3359 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3360 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3362 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3364 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3367 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3369 ** Configuration option
3371 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3372 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3376 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3377 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3381 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3382 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3383 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3386 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3387 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3388 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3389 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3390 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3391 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3392 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3395 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3399 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3400 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3401 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3403 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3404 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3406 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3408 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3409 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3410 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3411 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3413 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3415 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3416 not just the ones that reference directories
3418 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3419 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3421 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3422 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3423 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3425 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3426 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3427 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3428 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3429 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3430 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3432 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3437 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3438 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3440 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3442 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3444 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3446 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3447 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3449 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3450 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3452 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3454 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3458 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3460 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3462 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3463 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3464 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3465 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3466 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3468 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3469 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3471 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3472 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3474 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3475 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3477 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3478 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3479 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3483 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3484 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3485 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3486 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3487 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3488 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3489 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3490 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3491 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3492 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3493 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3494 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3495 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3496 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3498 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3500 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3501 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3503 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3505 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3507 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3508 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3510 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3512 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3513 without a trailing newline.
3515 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3516 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3518 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3521 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3525 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3527 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3529 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3530 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3531 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3532 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3534 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3536 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3537 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3538 be printed without leading spaces.
3540 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3541 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3546 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3547 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3548 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3550 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3552 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3553 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3555 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3556 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3558 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3559 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3561 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3563 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3565 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3567 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3568 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3570 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3572 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3574 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3575 byte offsets are specified.
3578 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3581 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3584 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3585 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3586 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3587 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3588 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3589 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3590 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3591 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3592 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3593 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3594 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3595 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3596 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3597 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3598 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3599 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3600 directory where M has write access.
3601 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3602 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3603 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3606 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3607 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3608 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3609 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3610 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3611 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3612 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3613 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3614 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3615 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3616 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3617 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3618 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3619 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3620 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3621 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3622 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3623 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3624 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3625 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3626 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3627 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3628 appeared one additional time.
3630 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3631 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3632 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3633 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3636 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3637 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3638 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3639 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3640 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3641 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3642 if there were more than 338.
3644 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3645 - false --help now exits nonzero
3648 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3649 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3650 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3651 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3654 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3655 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3656 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3657 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3658 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3661 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3662 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3663 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3664 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3665 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3666 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3667 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3670 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3671 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3672 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3673 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3674 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3675 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3677 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3678 under certain unusual conditions
3679 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3680 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3683 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3684 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3685 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3686 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3687 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3688 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3689 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3690 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3691 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3692 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3693 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3694 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3695 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3696 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3697 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3698 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3701 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3702 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3705 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3706 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3707 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3708 involving hard-linked directories
3709 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3710 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3711 character-special and block files
3714 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3715 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3716 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3717 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3718 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3719 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3720 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3721 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3722 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3724 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3725 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3726 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3727 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3728 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3729 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3730 specified on the command line.
3731 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3732 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3733 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3734 the first file untouched.
3735 * readlink: new program
3736 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3737 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3738 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3739 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3740 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3741 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3744 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3745 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3746 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3747 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3748 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3749 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3750 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3751 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3752 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3753 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3754 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3755 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3757 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3758 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3759 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3761 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3762 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3763 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3764 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3765 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3766 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3767 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3768 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3771 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3772 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3775 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3776 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3777 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3778 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3779 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3780 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3781 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3784 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3785 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3787 ========================================================================
3788 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3789 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3792 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3794 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3795 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3796 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3797 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3798 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3799 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3800 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3801 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3802 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3803 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3804 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3805 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3807 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3808 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3809 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3810 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3812 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3815 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3817 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3818 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3819 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3820 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3821 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3822 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3823 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3826 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3827 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3828 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3829 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3830 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3831 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3832 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3833 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3834 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3835 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3836 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3837 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3838 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3839 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3840 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3841 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3843 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3844 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3846 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3847 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3848 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3849 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3850 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3851 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3853 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3854 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3855 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3856 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3857 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3858 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3859 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3861 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3862 the source files in the following example:
3863 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3864 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3865 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3866 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3867 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3868 links between source files with --preserve=links
3869 * cp accepts new options:
3870 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3871 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3872 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3873 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3874 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3875 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3876 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3877 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3878 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3880 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3881 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3882 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3883 even though it's older than dest.
3884 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3885 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3886 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3887 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3888 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3890 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3891 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3892 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3893 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3894 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3895 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3896 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3898 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3899 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3900 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3902 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3903 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3904 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3905 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3906 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3907 This is the default.
3909 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3910 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3911 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3912 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3913 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3915 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3918 ========================================================================
3919 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3920 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3923 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3924 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3926 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3927 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3928 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3929 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3930 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3932 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3933 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3934 that specifies a non-directory
3937 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3938 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3939 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3940 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3941 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3942 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3943 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3944 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3945 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3946 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3947 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3948 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3949 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3950 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3951 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3952 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3953 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3954 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3955 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3956 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3957 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3958 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3959 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3960 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3962 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3963 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3964 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3966 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3968 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3969 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3971 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3972 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3973 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3974 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3975 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3977 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3978 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3979 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3980 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3981 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3983 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3985 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3986 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3987 * still more portability fixes
3988 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3989 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3991 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3993 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3995 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3997 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3998 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3999 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4000 there is any time remaining
4001 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4003 ========================================================================
4004 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4005 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4007 This package began as the union of the following:
4008 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4010 ========================================================================
4012 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4014 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4015 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4016 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4017 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4018 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4019 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.