1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
8 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
9 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
10 total line in this case.
11 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
13 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
14 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
16 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
17 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
18 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
21 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
22 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
23 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
24 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
25 which may have resulted in data corruption.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
28 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
29 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
30 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
32 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
33 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
35 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
36 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
37 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
39 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
40 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
41 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
42 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
43 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
45 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
46 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
47 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
48 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
49 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
51 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
52 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
53 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
55 `wc -c` will again efficiently determine the size of large files
56 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
57 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
58 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
60 ** Changes in behavior
62 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
63 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
64 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
65 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
66 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
67 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
69 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
70 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
72 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
73 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
74 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
75 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
77 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
78 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
79 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
81 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
82 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
83 This behavior is now documented.
85 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
86 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
87 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
89 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
90 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
91 from errors from the invoked command.
93 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
97 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
98 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
100 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
101 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
103 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
104 asked to move a file to a different file system.
106 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
107 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
111 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
112 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
113 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
114 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
115 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
117 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
118 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
120 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
121 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
122 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
125 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
129 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
130 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
133 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
134 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
135 before adjusting it to the correct value.
136 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
138 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
139 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
140 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
142 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
143 and B is in some other file system.
144 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
146 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
147 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
148 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
150 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
151 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
153 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
154 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
155 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
156 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
157 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
159 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
160 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
161 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
163 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
164 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
165 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
167 ** Changes in behavior
169 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
170 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
171 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
173 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
174 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
175 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
176 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
178 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
179 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
181 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
182 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
183 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
185 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
186 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
188 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
189 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
190 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
191 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
192 though they still work.
194 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
195 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
196 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
198 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
199 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
201 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
202 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
203 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
205 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
206 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
207 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
208 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
212 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
213 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
215 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
216 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
218 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
219 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
223 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
224 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
226 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
227 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
228 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
231 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
233 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
234 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
235 since synchronizing can take a long time.
237 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
239 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
240 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
242 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
244 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
245 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
246 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
250 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
251 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
254 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
258 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
261 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
262 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
263 is a non regular file.
264 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
266 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
267 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
268 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
270 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
271 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
273 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
274 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
276 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
277 heavily changed during the run.
278 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
280 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
283 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
284 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
286 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
287 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
289 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
290 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
292 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
293 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
294 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
296 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
299 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
300 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
302 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
303 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
304 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
306 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
307 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
308 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
310 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
311 invalid combinations of case character classes.
312 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
314 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
315 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
316 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
318 ** Changes in behavior
320 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
321 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
323 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
324 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
325 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
327 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
328 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
329 that was made in release 8.32.
331 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
332 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
333 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
335 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
336 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
338 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
339 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
343 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
344 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
345 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
346 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
348 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
350 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
351 when verifying tagged format checksums.
353 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
355 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
356 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
358 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
359 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
361 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
362 NUL instead of newline.
364 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
366 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
367 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
368 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
372 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
373 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
375 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
376 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
377 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
379 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
380 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
382 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
383 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
385 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
386 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
388 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
389 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
390 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
392 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
394 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
395 where avx2 instructions are supported.
396 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
399 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
403 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
404 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
405 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
407 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
408 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
409 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
410 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
411 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
413 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
414 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
415 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
416 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
417 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
418 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
420 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
421 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
423 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
424 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
425 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
426 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
428 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
429 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
430 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
433 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
434 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
436 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
437 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
438 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
441 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
442 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
443 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
445 ** Changes in behavior
447 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
448 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
449 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
450 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
451 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
454 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
455 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
456 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
457 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
458 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
459 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
460 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
461 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
464 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
465 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
466 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
467 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
469 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
470 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
471 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
473 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
474 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
478 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
479 file creation time, where available.
481 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
482 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
484 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
485 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
486 useful on network file systems.
490 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
491 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
493 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
494 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
495 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
499 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
502 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
506 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
507 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
509 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
510 after asking the user whether to proceed.
511 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
513 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
514 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
516 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
517 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
518 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
520 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
521 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
522 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
523 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
524 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
525 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
527 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
528 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
530 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
531 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
533 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
534 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
535 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
537 ** Changes in behavior
539 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
540 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
541 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
542 end-of-options marker.
544 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
547 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
548 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
550 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
551 environment variable is set.
553 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
554 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
555 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
556 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
557 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
559 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
561 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
562 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
563 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
564 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
566 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
567 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
571 id now supports specifying multiple users.
573 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
574 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
576 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
577 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
578 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
579 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
580 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
581 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
583 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
584 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
586 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
587 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
589 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
590 signal handling before executing a program.
594 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
595 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
596 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
600 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
601 which is common in Asian locales.
603 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
604 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
606 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
607 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
610 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
614 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
615 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
616 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
617 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
618 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
619 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
621 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
622 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
623 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
624 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
626 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
627 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
628 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
629 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
630 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
631 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
633 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
634 even if it can't be traversed.
635 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
637 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
638 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
639 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
641 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
642 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
644 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
645 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
646 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
647 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
648 now silently does nothing if A exists.
649 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
651 ** Changes in behavior
653 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
654 it is self referential.
656 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
660 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
662 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
663 each processing step.
665 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
666 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
669 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
670 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
671 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
673 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
674 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
678 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
679 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
681 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
682 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
683 and tail -f uses inotify.
685 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
686 which is especially significant on macOS.
689 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
693 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
694 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
696 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
697 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
698 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
699 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
701 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
704 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
705 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
707 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
708 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
711 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
712 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
714 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
715 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
716 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
718 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
719 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
720 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
721 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
726 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
730 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
732 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
733 rather than reading from the start.
735 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
736 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
737 for unknown long options.
741 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
742 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
745 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
749 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
750 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
751 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
752 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
754 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
755 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
756 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
757 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
758 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
760 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
761 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
762 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
763 now fails instead of losing the data.
764 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
766 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
767 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
768 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
770 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
771 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
772 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
774 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
775 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
776 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
778 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
779 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
780 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
782 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
783 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
784 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
786 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
787 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
788 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
790 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
791 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
792 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
794 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
795 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
796 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
798 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
801 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
802 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
803 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
805 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
806 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
808 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
809 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
810 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
811 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
813 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
814 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
815 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
817 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
818 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
819 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
821 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
822 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
826 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
827 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
828 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
830 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
831 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
833 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
834 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
836 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
837 executing the subsidiary program.
839 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
841 ** Changes in behavior
843 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
844 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
845 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
846 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
850 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
852 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
853 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
855 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
856 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
857 is effective in this case.
860 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
864 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
865 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
866 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
868 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
869 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
870 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
872 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
873 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
874 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
876 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
877 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
878 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
880 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
881 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
882 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
884 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
885 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
886 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
887 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
888 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
890 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
891 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
892 depending on the size of the first file processed.
893 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
897 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
898 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
899 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
900 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
902 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
903 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
904 time zone is indeterminate.
906 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
907 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
908 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
909 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
911 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
912 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
913 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
915 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
916 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
918 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
919 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
920 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
924 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
925 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
926 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
929 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
933 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
934 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
937 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
938 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
939 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
941 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
942 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
943 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
944 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
945 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
947 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
948 System V style platforms where this information is available only
949 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
951 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
952 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
954 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
955 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
956 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
958 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
959 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
960 defaults to a different SELinux context.
962 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
963 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
965 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
966 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
967 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
969 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
970 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
972 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
973 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
974 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
976 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
978 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
979 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
981 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
982 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
984 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
985 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
987 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
988 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
990 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
991 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
992 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
993 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
995 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
996 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
997 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
999 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1000 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1001 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1003 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1004 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1005 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1007 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1008 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1009 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1011 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1012 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1014 ** Changes in behavior
1016 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1018 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1019 values for any argument.
1021 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1022 they are out of localtime range.
1024 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1025 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1026 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1027 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1031 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1032 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1033 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1035 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1036 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1038 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1039 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1041 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1043 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1044 written to a terminal.
1046 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1047 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1049 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1050 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1051 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1052 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1053 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1054 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1055 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1056 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1057 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1058 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1059 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1061 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1062 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1066 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1067 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1071 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1073 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1074 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1076 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1079 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1083 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1084 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1085 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1086 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1088 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1089 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1091 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1092 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1093 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1095 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1098 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1099 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1100 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1102 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1103 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1105 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1106 that specify an offset for the first field.
1107 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1109 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1110 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1114 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1115 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1119 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1120 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1122 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1123 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1124 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1125 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1126 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1128 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1129 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1130 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1132 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1133 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1134 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1136 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1137 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1139 ** Changes in behavior
1141 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1142 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1144 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1145 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1147 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1148 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1150 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1151 when outputting to a terminal.
1153 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1157 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1158 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1160 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1161 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1163 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1164 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1165 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1167 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1168 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1170 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1171 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1172 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1174 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1176 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1177 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1178 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1180 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1181 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1184 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1188 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1189 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1191 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1194 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1195 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1198 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1199 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1200 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1201 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1203 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1204 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1205 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1206 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1208 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1209 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1211 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1212 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1214 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1215 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1216 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1218 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1219 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1220 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1222 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1223 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1224 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1226 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1227 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1228 character at the 4GiB position.
1229 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1231 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1232 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1234 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1235 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1237 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1238 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1239 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1241 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1242 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1244 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1245 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1246 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1248 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1249 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1251 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1252 when those files are being created or renamed.
1253 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1257 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1258 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1259 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1260 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1262 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1263 on stderr approximately every second.
1265 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1266 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1268 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1269 other than the default newline character.
1271 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1272 a useful setting with high latency links.
1274 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1275 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1277 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1278 and output errors in general.
1280 ** Changes in behavior
1282 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1283 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1284 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1285 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1287 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1288 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1289 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1290 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1291 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1293 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1294 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1296 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1298 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1299 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1301 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1302 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1306 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1307 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1309 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1310 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1312 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1313 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1315 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1316 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1318 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1320 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1321 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1322 documentation are provided.
1325 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1329 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1330 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1332 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1333 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1334 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1335 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1337 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1338 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1339 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1340 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1342 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1343 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1345 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1346 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1348 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1349 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1350 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1351 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1352 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1353 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1354 values are in octal.
1367 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1369 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1370 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1371 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1372 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1373 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1374 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1376 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1377 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1378 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1379 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1381 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1382 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1383 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1385 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1386 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1387 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1388 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1390 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1391 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1392 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1394 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1395 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1396 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1398 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1399 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1400 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1401 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1402 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1404 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1405 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1406 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1408 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1409 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1411 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1412 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1413 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1415 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1416 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1418 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1419 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1421 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1422 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1424 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1425 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1427 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1428 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1429 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1431 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1432 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1436 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1437 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1439 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1440 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1441 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1442 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1443 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1444 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1445 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1446 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1447 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1448 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1449 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1450 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1451 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1452 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1453 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1454 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1455 it suitable for embedded system.
1457 ** Changes in behavior
1459 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1460 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1462 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1463 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1465 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1466 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1467 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1469 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1470 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1471 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1475 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1476 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1477 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1479 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1481 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1482 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1483 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1485 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1486 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1487 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1488 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1490 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1491 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1493 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1494 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1495 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1498 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1502 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1503 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1504 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1506 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1507 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1508 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1509 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1511 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1512 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1513 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1515 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1516 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1518 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1520 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1521 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1522 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1524 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1525 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1526 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1528 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1529 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1530 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1531 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1533 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1534 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1535 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1537 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1538 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1539 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1541 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1542 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1544 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1545 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1546 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1547 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1549 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1550 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1551 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1553 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1554 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1555 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1559 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1560 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1561 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1563 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1564 used to identify the split points.
1566 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1567 command line argument through to the output.
1569 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1572 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1573 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1575 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1576 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1578 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1580 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1581 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1582 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1584 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1585 unique groups with empty lines.
1587 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1588 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1590 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1593 ** Changes in behavior
1595 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1596 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1597 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1598 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1600 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1601 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1603 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1604 not just the transfer counts.
1606 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1608 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1609 as per the documented interface.
1613 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1615 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1616 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1617 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1618 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1620 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1621 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1622 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1623 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1625 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1626 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1627 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1629 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1630 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1632 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1633 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1635 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1639 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1642 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1646 numfmt: reformat numbers
1650 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1651 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1652 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1654 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1655 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1656 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1658 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1659 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1663 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1664 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1666 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1667 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1668 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1670 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1671 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1672 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1674 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1675 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1676 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1678 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1679 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1680 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1682 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1683 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1684 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1686 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1687 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1689 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1690 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1692 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1693 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1694 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1696 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1697 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1698 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1700 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1701 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1702 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1704 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1705 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1706 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1707 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1709 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1710 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1711 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1713 ** Changes in behavior
1715 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1716 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1717 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1718 'total' in the target column.
1720 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1721 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1722 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1724 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1725 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1727 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1728 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1732 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1733 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1735 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1736 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1738 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1742 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1743 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1744 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1745 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1746 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1747 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1748 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1749 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1750 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1751 for a patched distribution package.
1753 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1754 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1756 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1757 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1758 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1759 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1762 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1766 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1768 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1769 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1770 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1774 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1775 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1776 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1777 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1778 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1780 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1781 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1783 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1784 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1785 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1786 eventually exits nonzero.
1788 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1789 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1790 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1791 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1792 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1794 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1795 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1796 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1798 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1799 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1800 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1802 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1803 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1804 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1806 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1807 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1808 Before, this would infloop:
1809 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1810 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1812 ** Changes in behavior
1814 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1818 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1819 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1820 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1821 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1822 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1825 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1826 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1827 format-changing options.
1829 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1830 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1831 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1832 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1833 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1837 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1838 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1839 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1840 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1841 are run without following the instructions in README.
1843 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1844 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1845 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1846 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1847 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1848 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1849 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1852 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1856 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1857 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1858 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1859 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1861 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1862 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1863 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1864 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1866 sort -u could read freed memory.
1867 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1868 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1869 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1873 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1874 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1875 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1876 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1879 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1883 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1884 processes will not intersperse their output.
1885 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1887 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1888 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1889 date: invalid date '\260'
1890 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1892 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1893 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1894 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1895 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1897 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1898 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1899 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1901 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1902 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1903 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1904 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1905 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1906 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1908 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1909 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1911 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1912 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1914 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1915 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1916 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1918 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1919 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1920 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1924 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1926 ** Changes in behavior
1928 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1929 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1930 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1931 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1932 have any reason to include it here.
1936 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1937 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1938 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1940 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1941 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1942 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1945 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1949 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1950 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1951 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1952 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1953 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1954 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1956 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1957 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1958 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1959 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1960 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1961 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1962 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1964 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1965 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1967 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1968 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1972 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1973 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1975 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1977 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1979 ** Changes in behavior
1981 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1982 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1983 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1985 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1986 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1989 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1993 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1994 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1995 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1996 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1997 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1998 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1999 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2000 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2002 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2003 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2004 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2005 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2006 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2008 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2009 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2011 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2012 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2014 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2015 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2017 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2018 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2020 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2021 additional static suffix to output file names.
2023 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2024 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2025 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2027 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2028 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2032 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2033 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2034 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2036 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2037 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2038 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2039 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2040 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2041 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2043 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2044 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2045 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2046 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2047 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2049 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2050 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2051 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2052 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2056 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2057 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2058 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2060 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2061 instead of causing a usage failure.
2063 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2066 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2070 realpath: print resolved file names.
2074 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2075 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2077 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2078 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2080 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2081 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2082 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2083 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2084 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2085 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2087 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2088 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2089 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2091 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2092 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2093 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2095 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2096 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2097 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2098 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2099 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2101 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2103 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2104 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2106 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2107 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2108 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2110 ** Changes in behavior
2112 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2113 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2114 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2115 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2116 usually-short referent instead.
2118 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2119 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2120 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2121 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2124 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2128 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2129 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2130 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2132 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2133 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2135 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2136 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2140 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2141 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2143 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2144 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2145 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2146 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2148 ** Changes in behavior
2150 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2151 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2152 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2156 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2157 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2158 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2161 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2165 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2166 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2167 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2169 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2170 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2172 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2173 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2174 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2175 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2176 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2178 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2179 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2180 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2181 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2182 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2183 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2184 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2185 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2187 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2188 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2190 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2191 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2193 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2194 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2196 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2197 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2198 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2200 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2201 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2202 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2203 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2205 ** Changes in behavior
2207 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2208 when -v or -c specified.
2210 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2211 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2215 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2216 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2217 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2218 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2219 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2221 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2222 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2223 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2225 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2226 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2227 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2228 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2229 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2230 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2231 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2233 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2234 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2235 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2239 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2240 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2242 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2245 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2246 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2248 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2249 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2251 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2252 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2254 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2256 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2260 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2261 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2263 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2266 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2270 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2271 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2273 ** Changes in behavior
2275 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2276 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2277 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2278 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2279 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2280 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2281 resolved for 2.6.39.
2282 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2283 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2284 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2288 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2291 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2295 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2296 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2297 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2299 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2300 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2301 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2303 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2304 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2305 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2307 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2308 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2310 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2311 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2313 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2314 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2316 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2317 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2321 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2322 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2323 processed portion thereof.
2325 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2326 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2328 ** Changes in behavior
2330 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2331 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2332 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2334 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2335 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2336 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2338 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2339 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2341 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2342 Use --preserve-context instead.
2344 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2347 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2351 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2352 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2353 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2354 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2355 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2357 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2358 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2360 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2361 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2362 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2364 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2365 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2367 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2368 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2372 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2373 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2374 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2375 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2376 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2377 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2378 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2379 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2381 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2382 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2383 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2385 ** Changes in behavior
2387 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2388 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2389 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2392 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2396 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2397 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2398 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2401 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2405 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2406 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2408 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2409 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2411 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2412 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2414 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2415 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2416 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2417 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2419 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2420 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2422 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2423 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2424 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2426 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2428 ** Changes in behavior
2430 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2431 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2432 to the number of available processors.
2436 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2437 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2438 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2441 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2445 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2446 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2447 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2448 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2450 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2451 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2452 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2454 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2455 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2457 ** Changes in behavior
2459 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2460 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2462 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2463 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2464 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2465 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2466 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2467 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2469 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2470 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2471 the same way as the others.
2473 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2474 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2477 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2481 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2482 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2483 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2485 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2486 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2488 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2489 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2490 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2492 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2493 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2495 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2496 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2498 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2499 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2500 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2502 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2503 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2504 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2505 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2509 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2510 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2512 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2515 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2516 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2518 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2520 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2521 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2522 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2524 ** Changes in behavior
2526 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2527 rather than its aliased target.
2529 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2530 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2531 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2533 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2534 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2535 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2536 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2537 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2538 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2539 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2540 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2542 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2544 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2546 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2547 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2550 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2551 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2552 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2553 control like taskset for example.
2555 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2557 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2558 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2559 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2560 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2561 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2562 includes %C when context information is available.
2564 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2565 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2566 rather than a file system attribute.
2568 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2569 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2570 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2571 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2573 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2574 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2575 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2577 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2578 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2579 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2582 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2586 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2589 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2591 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2592 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2594 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2595 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2596 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2597 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2599 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2600 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2601 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2605 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2606 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2608 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2609 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2610 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2612 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2613 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2614 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2615 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2616 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2617 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2618 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2619 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2620 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2622 ** Changes in behavior
2624 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2625 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2627 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2628 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2631 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2635 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2636 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2637 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2638 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2642 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2643 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2645 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2646 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2647 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2648 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2650 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2651 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2652 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2655 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2659 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2660 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2661 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2663 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2664 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2665 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2667 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2668 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2670 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2671 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2672 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2673 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2675 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2676 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2677 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2679 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2680 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2681 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2682 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2684 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2685 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2686 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2688 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2689 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2690 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2691 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2693 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2694 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2695 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2697 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2698 processes will not intersperse their output.
2699 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2702 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2706 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2707 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2709 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2710 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2712 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2713 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2714 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2715 the presence of the empty string argument.
2716 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2718 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2719 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2720 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2721 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2723 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2724 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2726 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2727 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2728 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2730 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2731 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2732 and with a malicious user on the same system
2733 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2734 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2737 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2741 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2742 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2743 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2745 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2746 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2747 offending directory and all "contents."
2749 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2750 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2751 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2753 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2754 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2755 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2757 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2758 processes will not intersperse their output.
2759 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2760 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2762 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2763 output the name of the file to stdout.
2764 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2766 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2767 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2768 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2770 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2771 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2774 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2775 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2776 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2778 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2779 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2780 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2781 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2782 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2783 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2785 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2786 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2787 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2788 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2790 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2791 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2793 ** Changes in behavior
2795 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2796 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2797 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2798 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2799 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2801 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2802 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2803 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2804 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2806 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2808 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2809 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2810 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2811 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2812 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2816 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2820 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2821 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2823 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2824 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2826 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2827 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2828 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2830 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2831 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2834 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2838 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2839 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2840 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2842 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2843 to accommodate leap seconds.
2844 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2846 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2847 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2848 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2850 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2852 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2853 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2854 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2856 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2857 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2858 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2859 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2860 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2864 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2865 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2866 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2867 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2869 ** Changes in behavior
2871 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2872 environment variable is set.
2874 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2875 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2876 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2880 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2881 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2882 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2883 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2885 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2886 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2887 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2888 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2892 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2893 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2894 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2896 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2897 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2898 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2899 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2900 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2901 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2902 another improvement:
2904 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2905 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2908 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2912 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2913 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2914 and libraries tested at configure time.
2915 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2917 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2918 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2920 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2921 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2923 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2924 printing a summary to stderr.
2925 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2927 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2928 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2929 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2931 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2932 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2934 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2935 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2936 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2937 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2939 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2940 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2941 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2942 which is relatively unusual.
2943 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2945 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2946 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2947 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2948 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2949 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2950 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2951 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2955 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2956 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2957 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2958 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2959 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2963 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2964 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2966 ** Changes in behavior
2968 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2969 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2970 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2971 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2972 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2975 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2979 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2980 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2982 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2983 before data copying has started.
2985 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2986 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2988 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2989 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2990 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2991 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2993 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2994 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2995 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2996 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2998 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3003 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3004 for its standard streams.
3006 ** Changes in behavior
3008 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3009 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3010 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3011 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3012 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3013 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3015 ** Deprecated options
3017 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3018 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3022 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3024 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3025 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3026 a btrfs file system.
3028 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3030 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3031 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3033 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3034 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3037 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3041 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3042 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3043 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3044 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3046 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3047 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3048 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3049 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3050 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3055 make check: two tests have been corrected
3059 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3060 inherited from gnulib.
3063 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3067 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3068 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3069 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3070 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3072 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3073 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3075 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3077 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3078 systems without xattr support.
3080 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3081 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3082 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3084 ** Changes in behavior
3086 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3087 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3088 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3089 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3091 ** Improved robustness
3093 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3094 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3095 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3096 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3097 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3098 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3099 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3100 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3101 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3105 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3106 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3108 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3109 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3110 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3111 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3112 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3115 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3119 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3120 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3121 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3125 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3126 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3127 data was read, or on process exit.
3128 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3130 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3131 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3132 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3133 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3135 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3136 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3137 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3138 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3140 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3141 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3143 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3144 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3146 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3147 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3148 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3150 ** Changes in behavior
3152 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3153 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3154 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3156 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3157 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3159 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3160 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3161 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3164 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3168 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3170 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3171 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3172 install: Never copies xattrs
3174 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3175 from overwriting any existing destination file
3177 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3178 mode where this feature is available.
3180 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3181 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3182 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3183 do not modify the destination at all.
3185 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3187 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3191 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3192 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3194 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3196 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3197 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3199 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3200 processing the first file name
3202 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3203 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3204 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3205 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3207 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3208 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3210 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3211 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3214 ** Changes in behavior
3216 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3217 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3219 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3220 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3221 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3223 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3224 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3226 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3228 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3229 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3230 is still marked with a '+'.
3233 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3237 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3238 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3242 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3243 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3244 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3245 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3246 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3247 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3249 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3250 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3252 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3253 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3255 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3257 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3258 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3259 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3261 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3262 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3264 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3265 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3266 used to factor large numbers.
3268 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3271 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3273 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3275 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3276 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3278 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3279 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3280 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3281 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3283 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3284 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3285 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3287 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3288 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3292 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3294 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3295 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3297 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3298 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3300 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3302 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3303 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3307 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3308 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3309 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3311 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3313 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3314 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3315 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3317 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3318 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3319 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3321 ** Changes in behavior
3323 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3324 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3327 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3331 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3332 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3333 'futimens' system calls.
3337 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3339 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3340 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3341 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3343 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3344 with no USERNAME argument.
3346 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3347 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3348 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3350 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3351 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3352 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3353 number of fields for some inputs.
3355 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3356 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3358 ** Changes in behavior
3360 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3361 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3364 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3368 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3370 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3371 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3372 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3373 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3375 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3376 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3378 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3379 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3381 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3382 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3384 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3385 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3386 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3387 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3389 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3390 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3391 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3392 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3393 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3394 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3396 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3397 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3399 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3400 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3401 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3403 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3404 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3406 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3407 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3409 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3410 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3411 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3412 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3414 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3415 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3417 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3418 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3420 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3421 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3422 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3426 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3427 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3429 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3430 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3431 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3432 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3436 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3437 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3439 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3441 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3445 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3446 which have negative errno values.
3450 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3454 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3458 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3459 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3462 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3466 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3467 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3468 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3470 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3471 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3472 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3473 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3477 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3478 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3479 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3480 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3483 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3487 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3489 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3490 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3491 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3494 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3498 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3499 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3501 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3503 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3505 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3507 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3511 ** Changes in behavior
3513 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3514 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3516 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3517 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3519 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3520 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3521 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3525 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3526 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3527 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3528 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3529 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3530 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3531 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3532 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3533 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3534 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3535 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3537 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3538 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3539 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3542 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3545 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3546 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3547 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3549 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3550 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3551 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3554 ** New build options
3556 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3557 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3558 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3559 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3561 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3562 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3563 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3564 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3565 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3566 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3567 of "make check" fail.
3569 ** Remove deprecated options
3571 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3572 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3573 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3574 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3575 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3577 ** Improved robustness
3579 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3580 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3581 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3582 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3583 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3584 loss of the contents of a/f.
3586 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3587 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3591 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3592 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3593 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3595 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3596 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3597 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3598 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3600 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3601 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3602 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3603 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3604 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3605 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3606 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3607 destination is a symlink.
3609 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3611 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3612 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3614 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3615 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3617 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3619 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3620 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3622 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3623 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3625 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3628 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3629 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3631 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3632 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3634 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3635 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3636 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3637 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3639 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3640 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3641 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3643 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3644 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3645 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3647 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3648 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3649 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3650 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3652 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3653 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3654 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3656 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3657 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3659 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3660 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3662 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3664 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3665 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3666 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3668 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3669 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3671 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3672 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3674 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3675 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3677 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3678 [present in the original version]
3681 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3685 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3687 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3688 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3689 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3691 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3692 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3694 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3698 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3699 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3701 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3702 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3704 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3705 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3707 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3708 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3709 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3710 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3711 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3712 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3714 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3715 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3718 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3719 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3721 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3724 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3725 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3726 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3728 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3729 directory is unreadable.
3731 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3732 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3733 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3735 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3736 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3737 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3738 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3739 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3742 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3743 Before it would print nothing.
3745 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3747 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3748 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3749 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3750 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3751 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3752 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3753 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3754 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3756 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3760 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3761 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3762 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3764 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3765 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3766 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3767 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3770 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3774 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3775 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3776 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3777 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3778 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3779 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3780 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3782 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3783 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3784 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3785 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3786 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3787 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3788 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3789 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3791 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3792 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3793 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3796 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3800 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3801 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3803 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3804 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3805 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3807 ** Improved robustness
3809 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3810 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3811 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3814 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3818 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3819 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3820 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3821 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3822 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3824 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3828 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3831 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3835 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3836 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3837 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3838 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3840 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3841 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3843 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3844 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3845 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3848 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3850 ** Improved robustness
3852 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3853 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3855 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3856 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3857 or NFS-mounted partition.
3859 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3860 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3864 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3865 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3866 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3867 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3868 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3869 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3871 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3872 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3874 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3875 or neglect to report file removal.
3877 For the "groups" command:
3879 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3880 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3882 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3884 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3886 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3890 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3891 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3894 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3896 ** Changes in behavior
3898 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3899 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3900 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3901 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3903 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3904 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3905 a final './' or '../' component.
3907 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3908 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3909 this only for pipes.
3911 ** Infrastructure changes
3913 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3914 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3915 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3916 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3920 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3921 name is "." or "..".
3923 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3924 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3925 dirent.d_type support.
3927 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3928 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3930 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3931 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3932 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3933 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3936 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3938 ** Changes in behavior
3940 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3944 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3945 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3949 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3950 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3951 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3953 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3954 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3956 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3957 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3959 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3961 ** Improved robustness
3963 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3964 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3965 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3967 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3968 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3971 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3972 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3974 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3975 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3977 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3978 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3980 ** Changes in behavior
3982 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3983 where the two are distinct.
3985 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3986 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3987 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3988 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3989 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3990 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3991 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3992 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3993 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3994 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3995 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3996 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3997 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3998 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3999 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4000 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4001 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4003 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4004 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4005 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4007 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4008 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4009 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4010 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4013 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4014 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4018 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4019 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4020 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4021 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4023 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4024 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4025 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4027 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4028 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4029 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4030 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4031 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4034 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4035 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4037 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4038 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4039 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4040 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4042 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4043 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4044 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4046 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4047 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4048 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4049 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4051 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4052 and sticky) with the -m option.
4054 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4055 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4056 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4057 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4058 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4060 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4061 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4063 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4067 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4068 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4069 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4070 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4072 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4074 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4076 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4077 silently ignoring one of them.
4079 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4080 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4081 containing this change was 5.92.
4083 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4084 automatically newline terminated.
4086 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4087 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4088 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4089 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4092 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4093 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4094 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4097 ** Scheduled for removal
4099 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4100 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4102 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4103 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4104 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4105 command to unlink a directory.
4107 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4108 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4109 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4110 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4114 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4115 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4116 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4117 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4118 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4119 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4123 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4124 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4126 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4128 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4129 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4130 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4132 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4133 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4136 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4137 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4139 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4140 list directories before files.
4142 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4143 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4144 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4145 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4148 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4150 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4152 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4153 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4154 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4156 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4157 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4161 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4162 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4163 usually printing nothing.
4165 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4167 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4168 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4169 them with hard-linked directories.
4171 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4172 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4173 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4175 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4176 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4177 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4179 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4182 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4183 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4185 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4186 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4188 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4189 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4191 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4192 all command-line arguments.
4194 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4196 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4198 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4199 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4201 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4203 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4204 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4205 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4206 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4207 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4209 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4210 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4212 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4213 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4214 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4215 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4217 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4219 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4223 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4224 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4226 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4227 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4229 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4230 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4232 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4233 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4235 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4236 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4238 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4240 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4241 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4242 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4245 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4247 ** Build-related bug fixes
4249 installing .mo files would fail
4252 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4256 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4258 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4261 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4265 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4266 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4270 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4272 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4273 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4275 ** Deprecated options
4277 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4278 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4280 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4284 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4286 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4287 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4288 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4289 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4291 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4294 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4300 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4305 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4307 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4309 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4310 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4311 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4313 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4314 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4315 problematic usages. These include:
4317 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4318 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4319 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4320 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4321 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4322 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4323 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4324 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4325 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4327 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4328 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4330 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4331 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4332 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4333 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4335 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4336 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4337 between binary and text files.
4339 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4343 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4347 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4348 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4350 head tac tail tee tr
4351 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4353 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4354 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4356 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4357 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4358 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4360 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4362 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4364 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4365 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4366 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4370 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4372 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4373 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4375 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4376 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4377 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4381 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4382 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4386 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4387 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4388 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4392 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4393 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4397 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4399 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4401 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4405 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4406 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4407 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4409 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4410 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4411 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4412 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4413 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4415 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4419 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4420 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4421 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4423 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4425 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4426 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4427 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4428 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4430 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4432 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4433 rather than silently wrapping around.
4435 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4436 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4438 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4439 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4441 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4442 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4443 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4444 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4446 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4448 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4450 ** Improved robustness
4452 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4453 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4454 no matter how large the result.
4456 ** Improved portability
4458 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4459 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4461 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4463 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4464 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4465 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4467 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4468 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4472 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4473 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4475 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4477 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4478 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4479 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4480 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4482 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4483 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4485 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4486 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4487 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4489 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4491 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4492 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4494 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4495 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4497 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4499 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4500 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4502 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4503 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4505 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4506 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4507 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4509 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4511 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4513 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4517 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4519 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4520 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4521 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4523 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4524 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4526 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4527 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4528 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4530 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4531 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4533 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4534 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4535 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4536 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4538 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4539 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4541 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4542 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4543 the file system does not support it.
4545 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4547 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4548 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4550 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4552 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4553 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4555 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4556 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4557 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4558 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4560 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4561 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4564 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4565 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4566 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4567 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4569 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4570 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4571 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4572 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4574 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4575 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4577 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4579 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4580 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4581 reporting incorrect results.
4585 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4586 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4588 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4591 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4593 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4594 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4596 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4597 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4599 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4602 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4603 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4604 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4605 the file name does not look like a page range.
4607 printf has several changes:
4609 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4610 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4612 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4613 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4614 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4616 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4617 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4620 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4621 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4623 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4624 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4626 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4628 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4629 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4631 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4633 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4635 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4636 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4637 when first encountering the directory.
4641 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4642 output; POSIX requires this.
4644 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4645 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4647 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4649 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4650 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4652 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4653 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4655 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4656 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4657 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4658 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4659 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4660 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4661 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4663 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4664 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4665 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4667 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4668 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4670 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4672 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4674 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4675 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4676 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4677 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4679 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4683 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4684 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4685 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4686 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4687 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4689 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4690 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4691 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4693 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4694 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4696 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4697 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4699 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4700 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4701 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4702 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4703 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4705 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4706 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4708 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4709 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4711 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4713 nocreat do not create the output file
4714 excl fail if the output file already exists
4715 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4716 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4718 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4720 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4721 direct use direct I/O for data
4722 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4723 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4724 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4725 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4726 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4728 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4730 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4731 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4734 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4735 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4736 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4737 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4738 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4739 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4741 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4742 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4744 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4747 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4749 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4751 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4752 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4754 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4755 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4756 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4758 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4759 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4760 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4762 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4764 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4765 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4767 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4768 for compatibility with bash.
4770 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4772 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4773 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4774 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4775 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4777 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4778 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4780 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4781 ls supports TABSIZE.
4782 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4783 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4784 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4786 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4789 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4791 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4792 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4793 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4794 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4795 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4796 an offset, not as a file name.
4798 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4799 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4801 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4802 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4804 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4805 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4807 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4808 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4809 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4811 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4812 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4814 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4815 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4819 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4821 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4823 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4827 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4828 or more arguments between partitions.
4830 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4831 holes in the destination.
4833 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4834 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4835 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4836 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4837 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4838 terminates immediately.
4840 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4842 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4844 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4845 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4846 not the empty string.
4848 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4849 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4853 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4854 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4855 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4858 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4865 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4869 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4870 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4872 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4873 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4875 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4876 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4877 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4880 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4884 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4885 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4887 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4888 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4890 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4891 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4892 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4894 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4896 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4899 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4901 ** Configuration option
4903 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4904 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4908 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4909 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4913 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4914 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4915 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4918 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4919 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4920 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4921 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4922 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4923 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4924 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4927 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4931 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4932 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4933 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4935 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4936 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4938 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4940 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4941 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4942 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4943 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4945 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4947 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4948 not just the ones that reference directories
4950 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4951 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4953 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4954 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4955 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4957 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4958 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4959 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4960 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4961 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4962 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4964 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4969 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4970 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4972 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4974 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4976 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4978 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4979 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4981 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4982 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4984 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4986 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4990 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4992 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4994 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4995 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4996 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4997 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4998 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5000 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5001 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5003 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5004 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5006 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5007 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5009 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5010 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5011 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5015 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5016 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5017 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5018 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5019 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5020 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5021 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5022 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5023 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5024 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5025 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5026 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5027 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5028 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5030 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5032 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5033 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5035 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5037 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5039 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5040 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5042 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5044 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5045 without a trailing newline.
5047 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5048 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5050 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5053 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5057 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5059 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5061 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5062 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5063 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5064 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5066 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5068 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5069 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5070 be printed without leading spaces.
5072 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5073 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5078 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5079 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5080 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5082 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5084 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5085 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5087 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5088 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5090 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5091 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5093 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5095 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5097 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5099 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5100 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5102 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5104 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5106 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5107 byte offsets are specified.
5110 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5113 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5116 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5117 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5118 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5119 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5120 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5121 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5122 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5123 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5124 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5125 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5126 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5127 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5128 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5129 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5130 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5131 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5132 directory where M has write access.
5133 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5134 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5135 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5138 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5139 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5140 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5141 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5142 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5143 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5144 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5145 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5146 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5147 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5148 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5149 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5150 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5151 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5152 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5153 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5154 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5155 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5156 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5157 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5158 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5159 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5160 appeared one additional time.
5162 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5163 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5164 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5165 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5168 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5169 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5170 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5171 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5172 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5173 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5174 if there were more than 338.
5176 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5177 - false --help now exits nonzero
5180 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5181 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5182 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5183 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5186 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5187 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5188 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5189 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5190 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5193 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5194 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5195 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5196 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5197 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5198 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5199 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5202 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5203 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5204 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5205 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5206 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5207 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5209 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5210 under certain unusual conditions
5211 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5212 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5215 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5216 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5217 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5218 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5219 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5220 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5221 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5222 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5223 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5224 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5225 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5226 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5227 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5228 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5229 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5230 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5233 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5234 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5237 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5238 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5239 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5240 involving hard-linked directories
5241 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5242 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5243 character-special and block files
5246 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5247 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5248 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5249 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5250 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5251 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5252 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5253 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5254 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5256 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5257 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5258 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5259 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5260 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5261 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5262 specified on the command line.
5263 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5264 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5265 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5266 the first file untouched.
5267 * readlink: new program
5268 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5269 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5270 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5271 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5272 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5273 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5276 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5277 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5278 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5279 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5280 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5281 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5282 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5283 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5284 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5285 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5286 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5287 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5289 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5290 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5291 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5293 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5294 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5295 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5296 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5297 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5298 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5299 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5300 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5303 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5304 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5307 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5308 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5309 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5310 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5311 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5312 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5313 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5316 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5317 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5319 ========================================================================
5320 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5321 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5324 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5326 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5327 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5328 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5329 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5330 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5331 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5332 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5333 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5334 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5335 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5336 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5337 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5339 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5340 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5341 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5342 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5344 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5347 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5349 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5350 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5351 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5352 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5353 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5354 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5355 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5358 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5359 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5360 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5361 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5362 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5363 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5364 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5365 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5366 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5367 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5368 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5369 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5370 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5371 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5372 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5373 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5375 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5376 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5378 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5379 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5380 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5381 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5382 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5383 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5385 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5386 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5387 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5388 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5389 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5390 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5391 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5393 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5394 the source files in the following example:
5395 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5396 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5397 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5398 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5399 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5400 links between source files with --preserve=links
5401 * cp accepts new options:
5402 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5403 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5404 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5405 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5406 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5407 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5408 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5409 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5410 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5412 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5413 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5414 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5415 even though it's older than dest.
5416 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5417 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5418 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5419 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5420 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5422 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5423 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5424 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5425 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5426 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5427 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5428 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5430 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5431 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5432 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5434 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5435 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5436 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5437 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5438 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5439 This is the default.
5441 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5442 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5443 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5444 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5445 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5447 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5450 ========================================================================
5451 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5452 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5455 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5456 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5458 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5459 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5460 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5461 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5462 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5464 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5465 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5466 that specifies a non-directory
5469 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5470 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5471 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5472 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5473 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5474 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5475 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5476 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5477 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5478 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5479 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5480 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5481 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5482 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5483 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5484 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5485 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5486 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5487 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5488 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5489 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5490 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5491 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5492 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5494 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5495 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5496 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5498 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5500 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5501 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5503 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5504 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5505 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5506 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5507 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5509 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5510 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5511 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5512 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5513 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5515 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5517 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5518 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5519 * still more portability fixes
5520 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5521 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5523 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5525 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5527 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5529 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5530 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5531 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5532 there is any time remaining
5533 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5535 ========================================================================
5536 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5537 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5539 This package began as the union of the following:
5540 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5542 ========================================================================
5544 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5546 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5547 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5548 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5549 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5550 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5551 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.