1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
8 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
9 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
13 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
14 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
16 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
17 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
20 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
21 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
22 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
24 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
25 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
26 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
28 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
29 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
30 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
32 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc systems.
33 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
35 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
36 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
38 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also line numbers are
39 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
40 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
42 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
43 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
44 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
46 ** Changes in behavior
48 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
49 summary line, accommodating to the --output option where the target
50 field can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df
51 prints 'total' into the target column.
53 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
54 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
56 df now skips the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs" unless either
57 the -a option or "-t rootfs" is specified.
59 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option which was deprecated
60 since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
64 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
65 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
67 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
68 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
73 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
74 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
75 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
76 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
77 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
78 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
79 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
80 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
81 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
82 for a patched distribution package.
84 The check in the root-only tests to test whether our dummy user,
85 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, is able to run binaries from the build directory
86 failed. As a result, these tests have been skipped unnecessarily.
87 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
90 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
94 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
96 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
97 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
98 sha384sum and sha512sum.
102 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
103 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
104 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
105 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
108 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
109 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
111 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
112 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
113 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
114 eventually exits nonzero.
116 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
117 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
118 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
119 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
120 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
122 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
123 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
124 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
126 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
127 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
128 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
130 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
131 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
134 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
135 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
136 Before, this would infloop:
137 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
138 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
140 ** Changes in behavior
142 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
146 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
147 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
148 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
149 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
150 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
153 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
154 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
155 format-changing options.
157 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
158 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
159 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
160 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
161 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
165 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
166 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
167 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
168 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
169 are run without following the instructions in README.
171 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
172 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
173 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
174 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
175 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
176 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
177 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
180 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
184 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
185 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
186 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
187 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
189 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
190 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
191 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
194 sort -u could read freed memory.
195 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
196 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
197 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
201 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
202 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
203 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
204 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
211 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
212 processes will not intersperse their output.
213 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
215 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
216 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
217 date: invalid date '\260'
218 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
220 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
221 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
222 lines output by df, can work reliably.
223 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
225 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
226 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
227 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
229 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
230 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
231 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
232 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
233 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
234 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
236 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
237 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
239 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
240 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
242 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
243 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
244 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
246 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
247 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
248 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
252 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
254 ** Changes in behavior
256 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
257 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
258 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
259 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
260 have any reason to include it here.
264 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
265 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
266 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
268 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
269 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
270 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
273 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
277 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
278 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
279 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
280 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
281 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
282 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
284 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
285 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
286 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
287 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
288 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
289 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
290 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
292 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
295 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
296 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
300 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
301 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
303 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
305 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
307 ** Changes in behavior
309 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
310 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
311 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
313 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
314 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
317 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
321 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
322 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
323 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
324 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
325 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
326 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
327 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
328 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
330 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
331 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
332 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
333 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
334 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
336 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
337 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
339 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
340 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
342 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
343 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
345 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
346 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
348 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
349 additional static suffix to output file names.
351 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
352 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
353 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
355 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
356 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
360 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
361 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
364 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
365 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
366 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
367 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
368 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
369 typically still point to one of the hard links.
371 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
372 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
373 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
374 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
375 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
377 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
378 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
379 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
380 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
384 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
385 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
386 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
388 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
389 instead of causing a usage failure.
391 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
394 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
398 realpath: print resolved file names.
402 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
403 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
405 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
406 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
408 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
409 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
410 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
411 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
412 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
413 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
415 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
416 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
417 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
419 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
420 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
421 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
423 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
424 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
425 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
426 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
427 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
429 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
431 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
432 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
434 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
435 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
436 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
438 ** Changes in behavior
440 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
441 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
442 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
443 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
444 usually-short referent instead.
446 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
447 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
448 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
449 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
452 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
456 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
457 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
458 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
460 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
461 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
463 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
464 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
468 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
469 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
471 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
472 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
473 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
474 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
476 ** Changes in behavior
478 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
479 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
480 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
484 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
485 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
486 only .tar.xz files is enough.
489 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
493 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
494 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
495 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
497 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
498 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
500 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
501 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
502 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
503 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
504 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
506 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
507 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
508 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
509 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
510 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
511 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
512 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
513 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
515 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
516 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
518 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
519 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
521 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
524 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
525 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
526 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
528 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
529 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
530 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
531 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
533 ** Changes in behavior
535 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
536 when -v or -c specified.
538 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
539 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
543 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
544 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
545 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
546 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
547 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
549 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
550 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
551 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
553 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
554 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
555 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
556 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
557 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
558 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
559 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
561 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
562 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
563 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
567 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
568 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
570 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
573 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
574 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
576 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
577 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
579 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
580 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
582 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
584 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
588 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
589 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
591 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
594 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
598 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
599 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
601 ** Changes in behavior
603 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
604 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
605 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
606 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
607 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
608 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
610 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
611 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
612 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
616 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
619 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
623 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
624 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
625 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
627 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
628 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
629 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
631 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
632 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
635 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
636 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
638 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
641 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
642 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
644 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
645 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
649 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
650 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
651 processed portion thereof.
653 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
654 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
656 ** Changes in behavior
658 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
659 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
660 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
662 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
663 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
664 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
666 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
667 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
669 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
670 Use --preserve-context instead.
672 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
675 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
679 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
680 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
681 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
682 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
683 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
685 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
686 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
688 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
689 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
690 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
692 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
693 reject file names invalid for that file system.
695 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
696 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
700 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
701 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
702 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
703 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
704 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
705 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
706 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
707 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
709 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
710 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
711 the same number of fields are output for each line.
713 ** Changes in behavior
715 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
716 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
717 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
720 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
724 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
725 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
729 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
733 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
734 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
736 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
737 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
739 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
740 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
742 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
743 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
744 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
745 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
747 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
748 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
750 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
751 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
752 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
754 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
756 ** Changes in behavior
758 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
759 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
760 to the number of available processors.
764 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
767 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
771 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
772 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
773 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
774 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
776 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
777 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
778 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
780 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
781 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
783 ** Changes in behavior
785 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
786 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
788 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
789 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
790 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
791 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
792 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
793 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
795 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
796 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
797 the same way as the others.
800 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
804 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
805 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
806 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
808 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
809 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
811 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
812 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
813 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
815 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
816 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
818 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
819 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
821 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
822 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
823 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
825 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
826 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
827 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
828 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
832 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
833 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
835 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
838 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
839 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
841 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
843 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
844 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
845 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
847 ** Changes in behavior
849 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
850 rather than its aliased target.
852 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
853 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
854 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
856 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
857 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
858 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
859 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
860 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
861 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
862 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
863 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
865 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
867 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
869 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
870 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
873 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
874 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
875 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
876 control like taskset for example.
878 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
880 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
881 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
882 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
883 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
884 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
885 includes %C when context information is available.
887 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
888 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
889 rather than a file system attribute.
891 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
892 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
893 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
894 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
896 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
897 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
898 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
900 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
901 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
902 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
905 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
909 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
910 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
912 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
914 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
917 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
918 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
919 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
920 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
922 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
923 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
924 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
928 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
929 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
931 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
932 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
933 duration after the initial signal was sent.
935 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
936 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
937 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
938 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
939 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
940 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
941 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
942 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
943 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
945 ** Changes in behavior
947 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
948 sequence when it would be a no-op.
950 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
951 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
954 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
958 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
959 of available processors, which may not have been the case
960 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
961 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
965 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
966 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
968 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
969 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
970 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
971 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
973 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
974 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
975 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
978 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
982 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
983 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
984 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
986 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
987 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
988 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
990 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
991 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
993 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
994 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
995 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
998 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
999 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1002 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1003 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1004 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1005 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1007 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1008 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1009 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1011 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1012 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1013 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1014 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1016 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1017 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1018 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1020 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1021 processes will not intersperse their output.
1022 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1025 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1029 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1030 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1032 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1035 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1036 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1037 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1038 the presence of the empty string argument.
1039 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1041 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1042 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1043 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1044 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1046 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1047 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1049 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1050 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1051 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1053 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1054 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1055 and with a malicious user on the same system
1056 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1057 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1060 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1064 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1065 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1066 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1068 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1069 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1070 offending directory and all "contents."
1072 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1073 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1074 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1076 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1077 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1078 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1080 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1081 processes will not intersperse their output.
1082 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1083 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1085 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1086 output the name of the file to stdout.
1087 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1089 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1090 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1091 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1093 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1094 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1097 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1098 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1099 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1101 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1102 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1103 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1104 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1105 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1106 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1108 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1109 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1110 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1111 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1113 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1114 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1116 ** Changes in behavior
1118 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1119 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1120 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1121 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1122 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1124 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1125 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1126 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1127 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1129 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1131 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1132 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1133 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1134 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1135 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1139 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1143 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1144 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1146 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1147 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1149 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1150 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1151 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1153 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1154 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1157 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1161 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1162 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1165 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1166 to accommodate leap seconds.
1167 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1169 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1170 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1171 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1173 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1175 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1176 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1177 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1179 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1180 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1181 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1182 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1183 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1187 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1188 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1189 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1190 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1192 ** Changes in behavior
1194 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1195 environment variable is set.
1197 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1198 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1199 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1203 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1204 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1205 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1206 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1208 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1209 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1210 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1211 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1215 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1216 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1217 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1219 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1220 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1221 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1222 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1223 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1224 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1225 another improvement:
1227 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1228 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1231 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1235 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1236 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1237 and libraries tested at configure time.
1238 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1240 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1241 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1243 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1244 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1246 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1247 printing a summary to stderr.
1248 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1250 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1251 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1252 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1254 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1255 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1257 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1258 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1259 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1260 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1262 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1263 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1264 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1265 which is relatively unusual.
1266 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1268 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1269 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1270 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1271 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1272 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1273 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1274 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1278 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1279 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1280 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1281 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1282 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1286 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1287 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1289 ** Changes in behavior
1291 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1292 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1293 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1294 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1295 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1298 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1302 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1303 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1305 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1306 before data copying has started.
1308 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1309 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1311 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1312 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1313 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1314 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1316 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1317 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1318 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1319 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1321 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1326 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1327 for its standard streams.
1329 ** Changes in behavior
1331 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1332 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1333 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1334 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1335 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1336 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1338 ** Deprecated options
1340 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1341 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1345 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1347 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1348 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1349 a btrfs file system.
1351 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1353 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1354 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1356 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1357 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1360 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1364 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1365 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1366 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1367 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1369 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1370 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1371 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1372 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1373 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1378 make check: two tests have been corrected
1382 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1383 inherited from gnulib.
1386 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1390 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1391 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1392 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1393 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1395 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1396 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1398 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1400 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1401 systems without xattr support.
1403 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1404 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1405 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1407 ** Changes in behavior
1409 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1410 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1411 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1412 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1414 ** Improved robustness
1416 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1417 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1418 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1419 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1420 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1421 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1422 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1423 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1424 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1428 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1429 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1431 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1432 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1433 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1434 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1435 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1438 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1442 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1443 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1444 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1448 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1449 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1450 data was read, or on process exit.
1451 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1453 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1454 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1455 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1456 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1458 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1459 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1460 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1461 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1463 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1464 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1466 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1467 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1469 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1470 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1471 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1473 ** Changes in behavior
1475 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1476 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1477 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1479 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1480 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1482 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1483 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1484 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1487 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1491 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1493 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1494 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1495 install: Never copies xattrs
1497 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1498 from overwriting any existing destination file
1500 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1501 mode where this feature is available.
1503 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1504 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1505 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1506 do not modify the destination at all.
1508 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1510 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1514 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1515 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1517 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1519 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1520 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1522 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1523 processing the first file name
1525 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1526 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1527 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1528 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1530 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1531 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1533 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1534 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1537 ** Changes in behavior
1539 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1540 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1542 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1543 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1544 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1546 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1547 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1549 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1551 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1552 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1553 is still marked with a '+'.
1556 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1560 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1561 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1565 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1566 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1567 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1568 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1569 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1570 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1572 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1573 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1575 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1576 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1578 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1580 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1581 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1582 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1584 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1585 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1587 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1588 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1589 used to factor large numbers.
1591 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1594 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1596 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1598 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1599 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1601 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1602 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1603 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1604 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1606 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1607 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1608 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1610 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1611 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1615 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1617 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1618 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1620 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1621 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1623 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1625 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1626 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1630 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1631 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1632 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1634 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1636 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1637 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1638 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1640 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1641 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1642 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1644 ** Changes in behavior
1646 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1647 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1650 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1654 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1655 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1656 'futimens' system calls.
1660 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1662 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1663 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1664 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1666 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1667 with no USERNAME argument.
1669 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1670 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1671 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1673 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1674 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1675 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1676 number of fields for some inputs.
1678 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1679 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1681 ** Changes in behavior
1683 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1684 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1687 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1691 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1693 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1694 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1695 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1696 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1698 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1699 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1701 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1702 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1704 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1705 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1707 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1708 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1709 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1710 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1712 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1713 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1714 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1715 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1716 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1717 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1719 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1720 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1722 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1723 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1724 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1726 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1727 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1729 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1730 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1732 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1733 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1734 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1735 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1737 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1738 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1740 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1741 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1743 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1744 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1745 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1749 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1750 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1752 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1753 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1754 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1755 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1759 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1760 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1762 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1764 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1768 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1769 which have negative errno values.
1773 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1777 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1781 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1782 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1785 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1789 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1790 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1791 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1793 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1794 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1795 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1796 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1800 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1801 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1802 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1803 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1806 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1810 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1812 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1813 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1814 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1817 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1821 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1822 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1824 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1826 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1828 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1830 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1834 ** Changes in behavior
1836 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1837 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1839 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1840 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1842 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1843 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1844 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1848 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1849 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1850 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1851 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1852 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1853 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1854 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1855 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1856 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1857 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1858 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1860 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1861 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1862 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1865 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1868 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1869 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1870 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1872 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1873 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1874 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1877 ** New build options
1879 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1880 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1881 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1882 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1884 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1885 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1886 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1887 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1888 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1889 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1890 of "make check" fail.
1892 ** Remove deprecated options
1894 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1895 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1896 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1897 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1898 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1900 ** Improved robustness
1902 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1903 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1904 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1905 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1906 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1907 loss of the contents of a/f.
1909 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1910 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1914 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1915 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1916 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1918 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1919 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1920 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1921 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1923 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1924 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1925 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1926 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1927 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1928 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1929 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1930 destination is a symlink.
1932 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1934 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1935 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1937 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1938 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1940 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1942 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1943 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1945 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1946 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1948 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1951 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1952 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1954 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1955 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1957 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1958 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1959 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1960 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1962 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1963 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1964 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1966 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1967 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1968 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1970 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1971 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1972 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1973 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1975 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1976 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1977 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1979 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1980 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1982 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1983 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1985 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1987 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1988 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1989 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1991 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1992 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1994 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1995 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1997 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1998 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2000 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2001 [present in the original version]
2004 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2008 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2010 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2011 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2012 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2014 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2015 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2017 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2021 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2022 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2024 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2025 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2027 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2028 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2030 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2031 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2032 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2033 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2034 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2035 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2037 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2038 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2041 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2042 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2044 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2047 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2048 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2049 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2051 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2052 directory is unreadable.
2054 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2055 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2056 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2058 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2059 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2060 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2061 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2062 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2065 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2066 Before it would print nothing.
2068 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2070 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2071 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2072 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2073 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2074 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2075 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2076 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2077 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2079 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2083 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2084 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2085 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2087 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2088 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2089 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2090 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2093 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2097 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2098 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2099 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2100 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2101 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2102 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2103 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2105 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2106 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2107 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2108 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2109 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2110 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2111 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2112 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2114 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2115 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2116 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2119 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2123 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2124 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2126 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2127 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2128 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2130 ** Improved robustness
2132 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2133 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2134 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2137 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2141 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2142 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2143 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2144 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2145 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2147 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2151 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2154 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2158 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2159 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2160 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2161 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2163 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2164 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2166 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2167 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2168 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2171 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2173 ** Improved robustness
2175 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2176 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2178 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2179 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2180 or NFS-mounted partition.
2182 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2183 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2187 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2188 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2189 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2190 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2191 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2192 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2194 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2195 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2197 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2198 or neglect to report file removal.
2200 For the "groups" command:
2202 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2203 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2205 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2207 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2209 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2213 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2214 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2217 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2219 ** Changes in behavior
2221 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2222 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2223 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2224 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2226 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2227 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2228 a final './' or '../' component.
2230 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2231 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2232 this only for pipes.
2234 ** Infrastructure changes
2236 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2237 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2238 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2239 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2243 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2244 name is "." or "..".
2246 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2247 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2248 dirent.d_type support.
2250 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2251 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2253 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2254 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2255 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2256 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2259 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2261 ** Changes in behavior
2263 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2267 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2268 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2272 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2273 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2274 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2276 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2277 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2279 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2280 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2282 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2284 ** Improved robustness
2286 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2287 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2288 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2290 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2291 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2294 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2295 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2297 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2298 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2300 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2301 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2303 ** Changes in behavior
2305 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2306 where the two are distinct.
2308 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2309 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2310 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2311 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2312 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2313 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2314 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2315 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2316 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2317 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2318 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2319 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2320 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2321 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2322 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2323 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2324 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2326 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2327 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2328 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2330 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2331 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2332 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2333 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2336 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2337 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2341 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2342 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2343 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2344 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2346 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2347 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2348 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2350 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2351 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2352 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2353 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2354 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2357 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2358 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2360 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2361 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2362 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2363 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2365 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2366 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2367 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2369 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2370 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2371 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2372 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2374 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2375 and sticky) with the -m option.
2377 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2378 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2379 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2380 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2381 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2383 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2384 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2386 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2390 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2391 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2392 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2393 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2395 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2397 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2399 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2400 silently ignoring one of them.
2402 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2403 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2404 containing this change was 5.92.
2406 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2407 automatically newline terminated.
2409 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2410 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2411 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2412 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2415 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2416 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2417 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2420 ** Scheduled for removal
2422 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2423 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2425 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2426 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2427 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2428 command to unlink a directory.
2430 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2431 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2432 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2433 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2437 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2438 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2439 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2440 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2441 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2442 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2446 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2447 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2449 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2451 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2452 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2453 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2455 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2456 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2459 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2460 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2462 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2463 list directories before files.
2465 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2466 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2467 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2468 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2471 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2473 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2475 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2476 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2477 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2479 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2480 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2484 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2485 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2486 usually printing nothing.
2488 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2490 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2491 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2492 them with hard-linked directories.
2494 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2495 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2496 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2498 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2499 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2500 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2502 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2505 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2506 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2508 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2509 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2511 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2512 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2514 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2515 all command-line arguments.
2517 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2519 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2521 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2522 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2524 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2526 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2527 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2528 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2529 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2530 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2532 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2533 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2535 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2536 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2537 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2538 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2540 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2542 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2546 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2547 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2549 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2550 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2552 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2553 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2555 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2556 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2558 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2559 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2561 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2563 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2564 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2565 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2568 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2570 ** Build-related bug fixes
2572 installing .mo files would fail
2575 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2579 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2581 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2584 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2588 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2589 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2593 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2595 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2596 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2598 ** Deprecated options
2600 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2601 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2603 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2607 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2609 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2610 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2611 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2612 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2614 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2617 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2623 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2628 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2630 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2632 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2633 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2634 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2636 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2637 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2638 problematic usages. These include:
2640 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2641 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2642 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2643 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2644 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2645 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2646 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2647 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2648 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2650 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2651 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2653 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2654 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2655 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2656 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2658 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2659 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2660 between binary and text files.
2662 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2666 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2670 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2671 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2673 head tac tail tee tr
2674 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2676 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2677 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2679 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2680 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2681 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2683 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2685 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2687 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2688 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2689 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2693 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2695 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2696 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2698 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2699 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2700 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2704 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2705 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2709 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2710 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2711 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2715 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2716 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2720 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2722 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2724 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2728 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2729 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2730 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2732 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2733 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2734 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2735 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2736 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2738 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2742 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2743 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2744 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2746 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2748 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2749 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2750 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2751 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2753 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2755 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2756 rather than silently wrapping around.
2758 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2759 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2761 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2762 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2764 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2765 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2766 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2767 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2769 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2771 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2773 ** Improved robustness
2775 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2776 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2777 no matter how large the result.
2779 ** Improved portability
2781 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2782 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2784 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2786 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2787 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2788 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2790 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2791 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2795 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2796 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2798 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2800 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2801 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2802 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2803 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2805 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2806 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2808 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2809 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2810 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2812 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2814 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2815 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2817 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2818 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2820 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2822 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2823 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2825 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2826 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2828 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2829 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2830 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2832 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2834 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2836 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2840 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2842 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2843 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2844 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2846 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2847 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2849 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2850 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2851 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2853 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2854 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2856 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2857 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2858 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2859 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2861 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2862 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2864 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2865 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2866 the file system does not support it.
2868 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2870 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2871 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2873 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2875 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2876 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2878 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2879 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2880 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2881 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2883 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2884 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2887 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2888 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2889 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2890 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2892 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2893 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2894 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2895 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2897 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2898 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2900 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2902 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2903 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2904 reporting incorrect results.
2908 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2909 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2911 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2914 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2916 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2917 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2919 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2920 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2922 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2925 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2926 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2927 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2928 the file name does not look like a page range.
2930 printf has several changes:
2932 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2933 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2935 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2936 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2937 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2939 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2940 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2943 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2944 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2946 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2947 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2949 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2951 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2952 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2954 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2956 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2958 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2959 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2960 when first encountering the directory.
2964 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2965 output; POSIX requires this.
2967 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2968 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2970 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2972 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2973 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2975 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2976 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2978 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2979 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2980 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2981 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2982 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2983 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2984 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2986 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2987 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2988 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2990 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2991 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2993 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2995 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2997 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2998 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2999 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3000 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3002 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3006 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3007 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3008 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3009 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3010 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3012 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3013 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3014 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3016 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3017 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3019 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3020 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3022 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3023 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3024 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3025 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3026 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3028 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3029 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3031 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3032 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3034 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3036 nocreat do not create the output file
3037 excl fail if the output file already exists
3038 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3039 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3041 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3043 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3044 direct use direct I/O for data
3045 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3046 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3047 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3048 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3049 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3051 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3053 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3054 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3057 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3058 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3059 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3060 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3061 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3062 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3064 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3065 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3067 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3070 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3072 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3074 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3075 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3077 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3078 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3079 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3081 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3082 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3083 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3085 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3087 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3088 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3090 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3091 for compatibility with bash.
3093 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3095 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3096 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3097 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3098 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3100 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3101 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3103 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3104 ls supports TABSIZE.
3105 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3106 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3107 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3109 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3112 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3114 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3115 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3116 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3117 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3118 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3119 an offset, not as a file name.
3121 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3122 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3124 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3125 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3127 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3128 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3130 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3131 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3132 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3134 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3135 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3137 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3138 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3142 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3144 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3146 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3150 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3151 or more arguments between partitions.
3153 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3154 holes in the destination.
3156 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3157 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3158 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3159 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3160 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3161 terminates immediately.
3163 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3165 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3167 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3168 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3169 not the empty string.
3171 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3172 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3176 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3177 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3178 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3181 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3188 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3192 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3193 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3195 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3196 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3198 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3199 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3200 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3203 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3207 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3208 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3210 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3211 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3213 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3214 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3215 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3217 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3219 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3222 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3224 ** Configuration option
3226 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3227 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3231 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3232 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3236 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3237 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3238 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3241 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3242 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3243 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3244 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3245 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3246 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3247 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3250 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3254 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3255 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3256 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3258 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3259 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3261 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3263 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3264 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3265 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3266 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3268 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3270 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3271 not just the ones that reference directories
3273 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3274 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3276 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3277 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3278 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3280 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3281 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3282 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3283 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3284 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3285 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3287 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3292 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3293 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3295 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3297 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3299 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3301 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3302 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3304 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3305 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3307 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3309 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3313 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3315 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3317 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3318 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3319 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3320 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3321 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3323 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3324 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3326 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3327 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3329 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3330 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3332 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3333 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3334 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3338 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3339 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3340 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3341 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3342 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3343 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3344 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3345 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3346 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3347 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3348 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3349 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3350 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3351 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3353 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3355 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3356 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3358 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3360 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3362 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3363 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3365 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3367 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3368 without a trailing newline.
3370 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3371 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3373 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3376 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3380 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3382 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3384 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3385 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3386 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3387 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3389 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3391 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3392 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3393 be printed without leading spaces.
3395 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3396 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3401 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3402 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3403 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3405 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3407 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3408 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3410 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3411 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3413 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3414 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3416 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3418 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3420 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3422 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3423 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3425 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3427 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3429 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3430 byte offsets are specified.
3433 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3436 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3439 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3440 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3441 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3442 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3443 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3444 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3445 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3446 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3447 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3448 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3449 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3450 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3451 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3452 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3453 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3454 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3455 directory where M has write access.
3456 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3457 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3458 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3461 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3462 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3463 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3464 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3465 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3466 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3467 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3468 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3469 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3470 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3471 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3472 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3473 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3474 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3475 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3476 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3477 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3478 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3479 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3480 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3481 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3482 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3483 appeared one additional time.
3485 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3486 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3487 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3488 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3491 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3492 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3493 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3494 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3495 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3496 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3497 if there were more than 338.
3499 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3500 - false --help now exits nonzero
3503 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3504 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3505 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3506 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3509 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3510 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3511 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3512 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3513 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3516 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3517 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3518 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3519 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3520 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3521 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3522 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3525 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3526 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3527 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3528 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3529 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3530 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3532 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3533 under certain unusual conditions
3534 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3535 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3538 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3539 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3540 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3541 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3542 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3543 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3544 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3545 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3546 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3547 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3548 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3549 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3550 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3551 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3552 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3553 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3556 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3557 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3560 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3561 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3562 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3563 involving hard-linked directories
3564 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3565 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3566 character-special and block files
3569 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3570 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3571 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3572 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3573 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3574 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3575 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3576 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3577 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3579 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3580 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3581 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3582 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3583 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3584 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3585 specified on the command line.
3586 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3587 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3588 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3589 the first file untouched.
3590 * readlink: new program
3591 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3592 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3593 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3594 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3595 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3596 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3599 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3600 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3601 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3602 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3603 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3604 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3605 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3606 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3607 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3608 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3609 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3610 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3612 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3613 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3614 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3616 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3617 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3618 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3619 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3620 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3621 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3622 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3623 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3626 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3627 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3630 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3631 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3632 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3633 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3634 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3635 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3636 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3639 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3640 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3642 ========================================================================
3643 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3644 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3647 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3649 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3650 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3651 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3652 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3653 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3654 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3655 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3656 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3657 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3658 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3659 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3660 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3662 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3663 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3664 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3665 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3667 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3670 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3672 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3673 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3674 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3675 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3676 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3677 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3678 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3681 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3682 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3683 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3684 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3685 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3686 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3687 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3688 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3689 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3690 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3691 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3692 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3693 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3694 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3695 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3696 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3698 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3699 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3701 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3702 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3703 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3704 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3705 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3706 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3708 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3709 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3710 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3711 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3712 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3713 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3714 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3716 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3717 the source files in the following example:
3718 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3719 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3720 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3721 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3722 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3723 links between source files with --preserve=links
3724 * cp accepts new options:
3725 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3726 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3727 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3728 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3729 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3730 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3731 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3732 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3733 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3735 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3736 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3737 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3738 even though it's older than dest.
3739 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3740 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3741 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3742 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3743 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3745 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3746 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3747 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3748 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3749 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3750 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3751 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3753 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3754 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3755 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3757 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3758 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3759 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3760 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3761 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3762 This is the default.
3764 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3765 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3766 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3767 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3768 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3770 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3773 ========================================================================
3774 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3775 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3778 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3779 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3781 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3782 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3783 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3784 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3785 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3787 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3788 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3789 that specifies a non-directory
3792 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3793 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3794 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3795 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3796 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3797 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3798 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3799 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3800 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3801 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3802 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3803 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3804 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3805 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3806 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3807 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3808 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3809 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3810 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3811 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3812 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3813 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3814 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3815 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3817 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3818 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3819 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3821 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3823 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3824 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3826 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3827 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3828 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3829 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3830 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3832 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3833 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3834 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3835 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3836 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3838 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3840 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3841 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3842 * still more portability fixes
3843 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3844 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3846 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3848 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3850 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3852 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3853 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3854 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3855 there is any time remaining
3856 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3858 ========================================================================
3859 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3860 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3862 This package began as the union of the following:
3863 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3865 ========================================================================
3867 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3869 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3870 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3871 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3872 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3873 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3874 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.