1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
7 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
8 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
11 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
12 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
15 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
16 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
19 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
22 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
25 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
28 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
33 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
34 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
35 processed portion thereof.
37 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
38 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
40 ** Changes in behavior
42 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
43 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
44 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
46 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
47 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
48 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
50 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
51 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
53 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
54 Use --preserve-context instead.
56 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
59 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
63 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
64 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
65 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
66 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
67 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
69 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
70 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
72 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
73 reject file names invalid for that file system.
75 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
76 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
80 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
81 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
82 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
83 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
84 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
85 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
86 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
87 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
89 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
90 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
91 the same number of fields are output for each line.
93 ** Changes in behavior
95 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
96 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
97 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
100 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
104 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
105 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
109 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
113 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
114 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
116 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
117 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
119 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
120 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
122 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
123 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
124 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
125 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
127 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
128 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
130 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
131 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
132 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
134 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
136 ** Changes in behavior
138 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
139 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
140 to the number of available processors.
144 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
147 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
151 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
152 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
153 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
154 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
156 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
157 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
158 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
160 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
161 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
163 ** Changes in behavior
165 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
166 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
168 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
169 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
170 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
171 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
172 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
173 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
175 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
176 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
177 the same way as the others.
180 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
184 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
185 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
186 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
188 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
189 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
191 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
192 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
193 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
195 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
198 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
201 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
202 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
203 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
205 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
206 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
207 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
208 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
212 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
213 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
215 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
218 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
219 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
221 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
223 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
224 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
225 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
227 ** Changes in behavior
229 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
230 rather than its aliased target.
232 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
233 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
234 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
236 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
237 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
238 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
239 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
240 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
241 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
242 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
243 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
245 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
247 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
249 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
250 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
253 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
254 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
255 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
256 control like taskset for example.
258 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
260 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
261 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
262 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
263 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
264 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
265 includes %C when context information is available.
267 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
268 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
269 rather than a file system attribute.
271 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
272 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
273 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
274 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
276 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
277 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
278 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
280 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
281 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
282 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
285 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
289 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
290 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
292 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
294 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
297 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
298 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
299 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
300 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
302 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
303 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
304 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
308 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
309 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
311 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
312 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
313 duration after the initial signal was sent.
315 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
316 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
317 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
318 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
319 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
320 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
321 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
322 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
323 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
325 ** Changes in behavior
327 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
328 sequence when it would be a no-op.
330 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
331 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
334 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
338 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
339 of available processors, which may not have been the case
340 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
341 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
345 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
346 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
348 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
349 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
350 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
351 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
353 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
354 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
355 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
358 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
362 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
363 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
366 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
367 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
368 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
370 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
373 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
374 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
375 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
376 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
378 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
379 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
380 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
382 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
383 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
384 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
387 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
388 renamed-aside and then recreated.
389 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
391 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
392 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
393 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
394 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
396 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
397 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
398 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
400 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
401 processes will not intersperse their output.
402 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
405 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
409 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
410 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
412 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
413 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
415 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
416 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
417 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
418 the presence of the empty string argument.
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
421 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
422 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
423 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
424 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
426 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
427 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
429 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
430 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
431 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
433 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
434 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
435 and with a malicious user on the same system
436 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
437 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
440 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
444 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
445 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
446 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
448 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
449 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
450 offending directory and all "contents."
452 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
453 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
454 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
456 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
457 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
458 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
460 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
461 processes will not intersperse their output.
462 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
463 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
465 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
466 output the name of the file to stdout.
467 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
469 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
470 call fails with errno == EACCES.
471 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
473 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
474 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
477 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
478 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
479 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
481 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
482 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
483 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
484 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
485 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
486 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
488 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
489 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
490 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
491 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
493 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
494 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
496 ** Changes in behavior
498 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
499 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
500 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
501 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
502 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
504 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
505 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
506 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
507 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
509 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
511 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
512 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
513 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
514 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
515 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
519 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
523 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
524 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
526 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
527 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
529 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
530 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
531 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
533 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
534 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
537 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
541 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
542 when the source file doesn't have write access.
543 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
545 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
546 to accommodate leap seconds.
547 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
549 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
550 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
551 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
553 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
555 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
556 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
557 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
559 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
560 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
561 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
562 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
563 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
567 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
568 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
569 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
570 directory or a symlink to a directory.
572 ** Changes in behavior
574 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
575 environment variable is set.
577 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
578 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
579 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
583 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
584 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
585 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
586 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
588 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
589 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
590 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
591 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
595 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
596 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
597 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
599 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
600 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
601 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
602 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
603 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
604 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
607 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
608 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
611 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
615 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
616 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
617 and libraries tested at configure time.
618 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
620 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
623 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
626 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
627 printing a summary to stderr.
628 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
630 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
631 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
632 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
634 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
635 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
637 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
638 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
639 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
640 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
642 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
643 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
644 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
645 which is relatively unusual.
646 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
648 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
649 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
650 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
651 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
652 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
653 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
654 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
658 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
659 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
660 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
661 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
662 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
666 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
667 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
669 ** Changes in behavior
671 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
672 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
673 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
674 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
675 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
678 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
682 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
683 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
685 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
686 before data copying has started.
688 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
689 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
691 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
692 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
693 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
694 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
696 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
697 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
698 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
699 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
701 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
706 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
707 for its standard streams.
709 ** Changes in behavior
711 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
712 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
713 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
714 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
715 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
716 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
718 ** Deprecated options
720 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
721 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
725 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
727 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
728 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
731 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
733 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
734 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
736 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
737 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
740 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
744 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
745 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
746 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
747 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
749 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
750 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
751 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
752 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
753 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
758 make check: two tests have been corrected
762 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
763 inherited from gnulib.
766 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
770 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
771 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
772 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
773 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
775 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
776 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
778 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
780 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
781 systems without xattr support.
783 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
784 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
785 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
787 ** Changes in behavior
789 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
790 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
791 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
792 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
794 ** Improved robustness
796 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
797 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
798 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
799 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
800 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
801 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
802 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
803 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
804 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
808 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
809 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
811 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
812 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
813 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
814 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
815 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
818 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
822 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
823 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
824 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
828 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
829 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
830 data was read, or on process exit.
831 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
833 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
834 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
835 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
836 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
838 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
839 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
840 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
841 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
843 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
844 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
846 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
847 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
849 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
850 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
851 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
853 ** Changes in behavior
855 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
856 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
857 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
859 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
860 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
862 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
863 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
864 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
867 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
871 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
873 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
874 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
875 install: Never copies xattrs
877 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
878 from overwriting any existing destination file
880 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
881 mode where this feature is available.
883 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
884 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
885 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
886 do not modify the destination at all.
888 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
890 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
894 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
895 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
897 cp uses much less memory in some situations
899 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
900 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
902 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
903 processing the first file name
905 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
906 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
907 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
908 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
910 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
911 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
913 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
914 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
917 ** Changes in behavior
919 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
920 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
922 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
923 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
924 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
926 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
927 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
929 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
931 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
932 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
933 is still marked with a '+'.
936 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
940 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
941 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
945 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
946 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
947 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
948 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
949 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
950 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
952 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
953 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
955 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
956 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
958 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
960 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
961 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
962 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
964 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
965 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
967 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
968 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
969 used to factor large numbers.
971 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
974 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
976 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
978 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
979 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
981 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
982 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
983 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
984 maximum command-line (argv) length.
986 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
987 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
988 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
990 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
991 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
995 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
997 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
998 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1000 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1001 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1003 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1005 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1006 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1010 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1011 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1012 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1014 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1016 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1017 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1019 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1020 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1021 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1023 ** Changes in behavior
1025 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1026 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1029 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1033 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1035 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1036 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1037 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1039 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1040 with no USERNAME argument.
1042 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1043 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1044 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1046 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1047 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1048 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1049 number of fields for some inputs.
1051 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1052 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1054 ** Changes in behavior
1056 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1057 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1060 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1064 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1066 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1067 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1068 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1069 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1071 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1072 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1074 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1075 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1077 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1078 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1080 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1081 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1082 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1083 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1085 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1086 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1087 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1088 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1089 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1090 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1092 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1093 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1095 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1096 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1097 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1099 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1100 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1102 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1103 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1105 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1106 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1107 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1108 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1110 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1111 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1113 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1114 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1116 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1117 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1118 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1122 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1123 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1125 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1126 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1127 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1128 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1132 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1133 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1135 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1137 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1141 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1142 which have negative errno values.
1146 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1150 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1154 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1155 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1158 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1162 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1163 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1164 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1166 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1167 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1168 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1169 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1173 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1174 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1175 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1176 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1179 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1183 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1185 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1186 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1187 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1190 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1194 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1195 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1197 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1199 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1201 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1203 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1207 ** Changes in behavior
1209 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1210 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1212 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1213 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1215 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1216 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1217 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1221 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1222 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1223 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1224 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1225 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1226 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1227 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1228 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1229 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1230 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1231 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1233 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1234 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1235 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1238 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1241 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1242 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1243 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1245 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1246 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1247 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1250 ** New build options
1252 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1253 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1254 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1255 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1257 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1258 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1259 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1260 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1261 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1262 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1263 of "make check" fail.
1265 ** Remove deprecated options
1267 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1268 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1269 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1270 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1271 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1273 ** Improved robustness
1275 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1276 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1277 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1278 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1279 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1280 loss of the contents of a/f.
1282 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1283 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1287 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1288 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1289 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1291 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1292 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1293 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1294 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1296 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1297 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1298 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1299 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1300 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1301 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1302 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1303 destination is a symlink.
1305 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1307 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1308 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1310 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1311 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1313 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1315 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1316 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1318 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1319 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1321 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1324 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1325 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1327 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1328 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1330 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1331 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1332 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1333 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1335 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1336 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1337 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1339 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1340 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1341 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1343 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1344 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1345 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1346 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1348 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1349 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1350 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1352 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1353 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1355 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1356 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1358 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1360 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1361 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1362 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1364 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1365 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1367 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1368 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1370 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1371 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1373 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1374 [present in the original version]
1377 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1381 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1383 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1384 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1385 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1387 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1388 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1390 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1394 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1395 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1397 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1398 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1400 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1401 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1403 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1404 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1405 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1406 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1407 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1408 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1410 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1411 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1414 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1415 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1417 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1420 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1421 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1422 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1424 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1425 directory is unreadable.
1427 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1428 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1429 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1431 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1432 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1433 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1434 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1435 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1438 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1439 Before it would print nothing.
1441 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1443 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1444 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1445 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1446 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1447 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1448 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1449 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1450 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1452 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1456 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1457 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1458 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1460 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1461 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1462 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1463 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1466 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1470 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1471 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1472 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1473 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1474 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1475 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1476 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1478 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1479 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1480 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1481 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1482 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1483 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1484 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1485 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1487 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1488 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1489 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1492 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1496 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1497 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1499 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1500 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1501 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1503 ** Improved robustness
1505 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1506 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1507 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1510 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1514 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1515 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1516 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1517 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1518 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1520 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1524 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1527 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1531 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1532 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1533 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1534 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1536 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1537 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1539 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1540 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1541 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1544 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1546 ** Improved robustness
1548 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1549 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1551 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1552 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1553 or NFS-mounted partition.
1555 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1556 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1560 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1561 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1562 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1563 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1564 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1565 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1567 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1568 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1570 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1571 or neglect to report file removal.
1573 For the "groups" command:
1575 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1576 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1578 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1580 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1582 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1586 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1587 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1590 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1592 ** Changes in behavior
1594 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1595 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1596 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1597 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1599 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1600 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1601 a final `./' or `../' component.
1603 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1604 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1605 this only for pipes.
1607 ** Infrastructure changes
1609 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1610 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1611 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1612 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1616 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1617 name is "." or "..".
1619 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1620 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1621 dirent.d_type support.
1623 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1624 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1626 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1627 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1628 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1629 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1632 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1634 ** Changes in behavior
1636 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1640 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1641 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1645 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1646 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1647 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1649 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1650 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1652 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1653 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1655 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1657 ** Improved robustness
1659 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1660 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1661 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1663 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1664 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1667 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1668 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1670 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1671 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1673 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1674 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1676 ** Changes in behavior
1678 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1679 where the two are distinct.
1681 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1682 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1683 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1684 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1685 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1686 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1687 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1688 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1689 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1690 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1691 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1692 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1693 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1694 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1695 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1696 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1697 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1699 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1700 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1701 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1703 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1704 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1705 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1706 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1709 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1710 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1714 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1715 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1716 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1717 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1719 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1720 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1721 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1723 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1724 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1725 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1726 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1727 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1730 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1731 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1733 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1734 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1735 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1736 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1738 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1739 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1740 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1742 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1743 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1744 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1745 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1747 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1748 and sticky) with the -m option.
1750 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1751 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1752 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1753 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1754 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1756 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1757 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1759 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1763 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1764 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1765 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1766 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1768 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1770 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1772 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1773 silently ignoring one of them.
1775 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1776 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1777 containing this change was 5.92.
1779 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1780 automatically newline terminated.
1782 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1783 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1784 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1785 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1788 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1789 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1790 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1793 ** Scheduled for removal
1795 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1796 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1798 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1799 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1800 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1801 command to unlink a directory.
1803 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1804 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1805 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1806 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1810 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1811 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1812 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1813 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1814 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1815 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1819 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1820 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1822 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1824 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1825 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1826 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1828 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1829 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1832 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1833 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1835 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1836 list directories before files.
1838 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1839 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1840 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1841 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1844 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1846 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1848 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1849 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1850 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1852 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1853 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1857 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1858 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1859 usually printing nothing.
1861 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1863 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1864 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1865 them with hard-linked directories.
1867 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1868 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1869 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1871 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1872 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1873 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1875 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1878 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1879 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1881 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1882 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1884 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1885 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1887 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1888 all command-line arguments.
1890 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1892 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1894 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1895 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1897 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1899 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1900 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1901 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1902 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1903 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1905 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1906 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1908 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1909 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1910 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1911 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1913 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1915 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1919 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1920 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1922 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1923 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1925 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1926 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1928 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1929 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1931 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1932 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1934 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1936 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1937 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1938 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1941 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1943 ** Build-related bug fixes
1945 installing .mo files would fail
1948 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1952 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1954 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1957 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1961 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1962 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1966 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1968 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1969 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1971 ** Deprecated options
1973 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1974 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1976 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1980 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1982 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1983 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1984 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1985 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1987 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1990 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1996 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2001 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2003 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2005 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2006 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2007 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2009 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2010 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2011 problematic usages. These include:
2013 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2014 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2015 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2016 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2017 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2018 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2019 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2020 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2021 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2023 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2024 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2026 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2027 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2028 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2029 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2031 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2032 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2033 between binary and text files.
2035 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2039 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2043 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2044 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2046 head tac tail tee tr
2047 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2049 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2050 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2052 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2053 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2054 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2056 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2058 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2060 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2061 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2062 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2066 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2068 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2069 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2071 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2072 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2073 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2077 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2078 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2082 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2083 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2084 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2088 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2089 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2093 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2095 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2097 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2101 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2102 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2103 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2105 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2106 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2107 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2108 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2109 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2111 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2115 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2116 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2117 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2119 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2121 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2122 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2123 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2124 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2126 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2128 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2129 rather than silently wrapping around.
2131 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2132 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2134 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2135 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2137 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2138 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2139 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2140 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2142 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2144 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2146 ** Improved robustness
2148 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2149 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2150 no matter how large the result.
2152 ** Improved portability
2154 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2155 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2157 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2159 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2160 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2161 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2163 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2164 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2168 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2169 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2171 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2173 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2174 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2175 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2176 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2178 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2179 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2181 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2182 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2183 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2185 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2187 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2188 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2190 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2191 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2193 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2195 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2196 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2198 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2199 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2201 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2202 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2203 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2205 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2207 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2209 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2213 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2215 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2216 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2217 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2219 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2220 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2222 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2223 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2224 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2226 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2227 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2229 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2230 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2231 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2232 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2234 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2235 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2237 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2238 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2239 the file system does not support it.
2241 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2243 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2244 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2246 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2248 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2249 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2251 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2252 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2253 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2254 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2256 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2257 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2260 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2261 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2262 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2263 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2265 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2266 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2267 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2268 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2270 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2271 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2273 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2275 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2276 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2277 reporting incorrect results.
2281 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2282 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2284 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2287 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2289 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2290 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2292 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2293 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2295 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2298 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2299 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2300 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2301 the file name does not look like a page range.
2303 printf has several changes:
2305 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2306 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2308 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2309 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2310 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2312 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2313 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2316 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2317 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2319 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2320 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2322 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2324 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2325 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2327 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2329 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2331 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2332 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2333 when first encountering the directory.
2337 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2338 output; POSIX requires this.
2340 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2341 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2343 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2345 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2346 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2348 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2349 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2351 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2352 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2353 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2354 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2355 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2356 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2357 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2359 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2360 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2361 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2363 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2364 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2366 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2368 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2370 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2371 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2372 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2373 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2375 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2379 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2380 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2381 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2382 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2383 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2385 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2386 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2387 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2389 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2390 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2392 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2393 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2395 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2396 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2397 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2398 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2399 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2401 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2402 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2404 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2405 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2407 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2409 nocreat do not create the output file
2410 excl fail if the output file already exists
2411 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2412 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2414 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2416 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2417 direct use direct I/O for data
2418 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2419 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2420 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2421 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2422 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2424 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2426 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2427 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2430 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2431 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2432 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2433 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2434 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2435 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2437 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2438 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2440 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2443 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2445 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2447 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2448 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2450 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2451 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2452 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2454 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2455 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2456 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2458 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2460 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2461 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2463 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2464 for compatibility with bash.
2466 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2468 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2469 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2470 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2471 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2473 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2474 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2476 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2477 ls supports TABSIZE.
2478 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2479 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2480 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2482 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2485 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2487 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2488 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2489 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2490 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2491 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2492 an offset, not as a file name.
2494 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2495 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2497 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2498 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2500 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2501 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2503 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2504 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2505 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2507 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2508 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2510 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2511 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2515 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2517 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2519 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2523 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2524 or more arguments between partitions.
2526 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2527 holes in the destination.
2529 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2530 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2531 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2532 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2533 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2534 terminates immediately.
2536 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2538 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2540 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2541 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2542 not the empty string.
2544 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2545 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2549 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2550 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2551 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2554 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2561 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2565 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2566 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2568 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2569 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2571 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2572 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2573 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2576 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2580 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2581 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2583 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2584 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2586 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2587 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2588 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2590 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2592 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2595 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2597 ** Configuration option
2599 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2600 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2604 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2605 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2609 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2610 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2611 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2614 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2615 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2616 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2617 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2618 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2619 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2620 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2623 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2627 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2628 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2629 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2631 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2632 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2634 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2636 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2637 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2638 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2639 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2641 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2643 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2644 not just the ones that reference directories
2646 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2647 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2649 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2650 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2651 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2653 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2654 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2655 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2656 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2657 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2658 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2660 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2665 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2666 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2668 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2670 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2672 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2674 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2675 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2677 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2678 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2680 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2682 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2686 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2688 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2690 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2691 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2692 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2693 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2694 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2696 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2697 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2699 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2700 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2702 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2703 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2705 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2706 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2707 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2711 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2712 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2713 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2714 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2715 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2716 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2717 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2718 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2719 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2720 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2721 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2722 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2723 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2724 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2726 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2728 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2729 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2731 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2733 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2735 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2736 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2738 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2740 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2741 without a trailing newline.
2743 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2744 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2746 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2749 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2753 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2755 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2757 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2758 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2759 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2760 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2762 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2764 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2765 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2766 be printed without leading spaces.
2768 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2769 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2774 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2775 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2776 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2778 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2780 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2781 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2783 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2784 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2786 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2787 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2789 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2791 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2793 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2795 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2796 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2798 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2800 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2802 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2803 byte offsets are specified.
2806 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2809 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2812 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2813 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2814 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2815 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2816 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2817 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2818 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2819 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2820 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2821 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2822 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2823 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2824 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2825 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2826 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2827 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2828 directory where M has write access.
2829 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2830 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2831 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2834 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2835 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2836 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2837 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2838 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2839 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2840 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2841 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2842 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2843 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2844 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2845 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2846 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2847 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2848 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2849 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2850 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2851 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2852 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2853 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2854 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2855 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2856 appeared one additional time.
2858 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2859 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2860 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2861 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2864 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2865 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2866 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2867 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2868 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2869 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2870 if there were more than 338.
2872 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2873 - false --help now exits nonzero
2876 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2877 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2878 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2879 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2882 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2883 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2884 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2885 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2886 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2889 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2890 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2891 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2892 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2893 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2894 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2895 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2898 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2899 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2900 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2901 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2902 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2903 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2905 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2906 under certain unusual conditions
2907 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2908 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2911 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2912 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2913 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2914 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2915 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2916 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2917 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2918 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2919 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2920 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2921 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2922 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2923 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2924 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2925 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2926 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2929 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2930 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2933 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2934 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2935 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2936 involving hard-linked directories
2937 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2938 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2939 character-special and block files
2942 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2943 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2944 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2945 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2946 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2947 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2948 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2949 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2950 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2952 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2953 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2954 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2955 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2956 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2957 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2958 specified on the command line.
2959 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2960 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2961 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2962 the first file untouched.
2963 * readlink: new program
2964 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2965 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2966 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2967 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2968 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2969 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2972 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2973 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2974 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2975 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2976 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2977 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2978 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2979 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2980 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2981 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2982 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2983 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2985 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2986 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2987 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2989 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2990 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2991 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2992 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2993 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2994 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2995 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2996 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2999 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3000 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3003 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3004 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3005 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3006 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3007 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3008 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3009 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3012 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3013 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3015 ========================================================================
3016 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3017 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3020 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3022 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3023 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3024 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3025 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3026 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3027 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3028 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3029 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3030 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3031 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3032 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3033 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3035 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3036 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3037 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3038 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3040 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3043 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3045 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3046 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3047 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3048 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3049 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3050 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3051 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3054 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3055 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3056 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3057 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3058 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3059 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3060 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3061 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3062 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3063 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3064 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3065 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3066 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3067 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3068 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3069 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3071 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3072 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3074 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3075 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3076 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3077 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3078 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3079 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3081 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3082 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3083 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3084 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3085 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3086 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3087 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3089 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3090 the source files in the following example:
3091 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3092 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3093 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3094 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3095 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3096 links between source files with --preserve=links
3097 * cp accepts new options:
3098 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3099 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3100 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3101 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3102 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3103 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3104 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3105 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3106 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3108 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3109 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3110 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3111 even though it's older than dest.
3112 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3113 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3114 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3115 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3116 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3118 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3119 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3120 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3121 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3122 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3123 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3124 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3126 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3127 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3128 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3130 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3131 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3132 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3133 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3134 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3135 This is the default.
3137 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3138 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3139 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3140 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3141 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3143 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3146 ========================================================================
3147 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3148 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3151 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3152 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3154 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3155 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3156 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3157 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3158 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3160 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3161 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3162 that specifies a non-directory
3165 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3166 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3167 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3168 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3169 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3170 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3171 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3172 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3173 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3174 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3175 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3176 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3177 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3178 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3179 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3180 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3181 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3182 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3183 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3184 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3185 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3186 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3187 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3188 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3190 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3191 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3192 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3194 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3196 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3197 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3199 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3200 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3201 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3202 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3203 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3205 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3206 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3207 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3208 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3209 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3211 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3213 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3214 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3215 * still more portability fixes
3216 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3217 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3219 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3221 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3223 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3225 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3226 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3227 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3228 there is any time remaining
3229 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3231 ========================================================================
3232 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3233 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3235 This package began as the union of the following:
3236 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3238 ========================================================================
3240 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3242 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3243 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3244 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3245 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3246 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3247 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.