1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp fixes support for --update=none-fail, which would have been
8 rejected as an invalid option.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.5]
11 ls and printf fix shell quoted output in the edge case of escaped
12 first and last characters, and single quotes in the string.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
15 mv works again with macFUSE file systems. Previously it would
16 have exited with a "Function not implemented" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
19 'tail -c 4096 /dev/zero' no longer loops forever.
20 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
22 ** Changes in behavior
24 ls's -f option now simply acts like -aU, instead of also ignoring
25 some earlier options. For example 'ls -fl' and 'ls -lf' are now
26 equivalent because -f no longer ignores an earlier -l. The new
27 behavior is more orthogonal and is compatible with FreeBSD.
31 sort operates more efficiently when used on pseudo files with
32 an apparent size of 0, like those in /proc.
34 wc now reads a minimum of 256KiB at a time.
35 This was previously 16KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase
36 wc -l performance by about 10% when reading cached files on modern systems.
39 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.5 (2024-03-28) [stable]
43 chmod -R now avoids a race where an attacker may replace a traversed file
44 with a symlink, causing chmod to operate on an unintended file.
45 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
47 cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed
48 to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.
49 They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.
51 cp --no-preserve=mode will correctly maintain set-group-ID bits
52 for created directories. Previously on systems that didn't support ACLs,
53 cp would have reset the set-group-ID bit on created directories.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
56 join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.
57 For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,
58 and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000
59 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.
61 numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
62 [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]
64 mktemp with --suffix now better diagnoses templates with too few X's.
65 Previously it conflated the insignificant --suffix in the error.
66 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
68 sort again handles thousands grouping characters in single-byte locales
69 where the grouping character is greater than CHAR_MAX. For e.g. signed
70 character platforms with a 0xA0 (aka  ) grouping character.
71 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
73 split --line-bytes with a mixture of very long and short lines
74 no longer overwrites the heap (CVE-2024-0684).
75 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
77 tail no longer mishandles input from files in /proc and /sys file systems,
78 on systems with a page size larger than the stdio BUFSIZ.
79 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
81 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might kill arbitrary
82 processes after a failed process fork.
83 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
85 timeout avoids a narrow race condition, where it might fail to
86 kill monitored processes immediately after forking them.
87 [bug introduced with timeout in coreutils-7.0]
89 wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.
90 [bug introduced in textutils-2.1]
92 ** Changes in behavior
94 base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.
95 Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.
97 base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.
98 Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.
100 basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.
101 Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.
103 cp --no-clobber, and mv -n no longer exit with failure status if
104 existing files are encountered in the destination. Instead they revert
105 to the behavior from before v9.2, silently skipping existing files.
107 ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,
108 and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.
110 numfmt will accept lowercase 'k' to indicate Kilo or Kibi units on input,
111 and uses lowercase 'k' when outputting such units in '--to=si' mode.
113 pinky no longer tries to canonicalize the user's login location by default,
114 rather requiring the new --lookup option to enable this often slow feature.
116 wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.
117 Instead, it treats them as non white space.
121 chgrp now accepts the --from=OWNER:GROUP option to restrict changes to files
122 with matching current OWNER and/or GROUP, as already supported by chown(1).
124 chmod adds support for -h, -H,-L,-P, and --dereference options, providing
125 more control over symlink handling. This supports more secure handling of
126 CLI arguments, and is more consistent with chown, and chmod on other systems.
128 cp now accepts the --keep-directory-symlink option (like tar), to preserve
129 and follow existing symlinks to directories in the destination.
131 cp and mv now accept the --update=none-fail option, which is similar
132 to the --no-clobber option, except that existing files are diagnosed,
133 and the command exits with failure status if existing files.
134 The -n,--no-clobber option is best avoided due to platform differences.
136 env now accepts the -a,--argv0 option to override the zeroth argument
137 of the command being executed.
139 mv now accepts an --exchange option, which causes the source and
140 destination to be exchanged. It should be combined with
141 --no-target-directory (-T) if the destination is a directory.
142 The exchange is atomic if source and destination are on a single
143 file system that supports atomic exchange; --exchange is not yet
144 supported in other situations.
146 od now supports printing IEEE half precision floating point with -t fH,
147 or brain 16 bit floating point with -t fB, where supported by the compiler.
149 tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.
153 cp,mv,install,cat,split now read and write a minimum of 256KiB at a time.
154 This was previously 128KiB and increasing to 256KiB was seen to increase
155 throughput by 10-20% when reading cached files on modern systems.
157 env,kill,timeout now support unnamed signals. kill(1) for example now
158 supports sending such signals, and env(1) will list them appropriately.
160 SELinux operations in file copy operations are now more efficient,
161 avoiding unneeded MCS/MLS label translation.
163 sort no longer dynamically links to libcrypto unless -R is used.
164 This decreases startup overhead in the typical case.
166 wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in
170 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
174 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
175 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
176 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
178 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
179 presented with malformed checksum lines.
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
182 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
183 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
186 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
187 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
190 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
193 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
194 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
195 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
198 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
199 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
200 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
202 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
203 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
205 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
206 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
207 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
209 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
210 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
211 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
213 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
214 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
215 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
218 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
219 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
221 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
222 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
225 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
226 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
227 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
229 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
230 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
231 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
233 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
234 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
235 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
237 ** Changes in behavior
239 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
240 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
241 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
243 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
244 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
245 checksum utilities with cksum.
247 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
248 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
249 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
250 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
251 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
252 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
256 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
257 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
258 reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
260 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
261 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
263 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
264 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
266 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
268 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
270 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
271 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
273 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
274 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
277 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
278 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
279 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
280 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
281 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
282 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
285 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
289 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
290 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
291 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
292 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
293 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
295 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
296 Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
297 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
298 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
300 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
301 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
302 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
304 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
305 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
306 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
307 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
309 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
310 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
312 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
313 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
314 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
316 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
317 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
318 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
319 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
321 ** Changes in behavior
323 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
324 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
325 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
326 due to -n, -i, or -u.
330 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
331 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
332 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
335 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
339 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
340 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
341 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
342 total line in this case.
343 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
345 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
346 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
347 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
349 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
350 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
352 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
353 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
354 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
355 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
357 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
358 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
359 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
360 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
361 which may have resulted in data corruption.
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
364 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
365 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
366 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
368 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
371 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
372 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
373 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
375 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
376 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
377 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
379 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
380 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
381 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
383 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
384 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
385 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
386 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
387 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
389 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
390 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
391 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
392 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
393 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
395 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
396 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
399 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
400 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
401 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
403 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
404 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
405 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
406 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
408 ** Changes in behavior
410 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
411 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
412 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
413 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
414 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
415 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
417 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
418 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
420 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
421 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
422 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
423 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
425 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
426 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
427 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
429 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
430 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
431 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
432 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
434 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
435 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
436 This behavior is now documented.
438 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
439 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
441 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
442 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
443 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
445 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
446 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
447 from errors from the invoked command.
449 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
450 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
451 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
454 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
458 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
459 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
461 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
462 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
464 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
465 print details on how a file is being copied.
467 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
468 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
470 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
471 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
473 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
474 asked to move a file to a different file system.
476 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
477 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
479 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
480 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
482 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
483 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
487 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
488 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
489 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
490 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
491 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
493 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
494 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
496 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
497 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
499 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
500 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
501 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
503 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
504 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
505 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
507 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
508 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
510 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
511 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
512 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
513 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
516 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
520 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
521 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
524 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
525 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
526 before adjusting it to the correct value.
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
529 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
530 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
531 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
533 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
534 and B is in some other file system.
535 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
537 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
538 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
539 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
541 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
542 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
544 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
545 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
546 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
547 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
550 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
551 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
554 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
555 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
556 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
558 ** Changes in behavior
560 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
561 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
562 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
564 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
565 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
566 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
567 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
569 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
570 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
572 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
573 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
574 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
576 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
577 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
579 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
580 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
581 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
582 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
583 though they still work.
585 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
586 capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
587 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
589 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
590 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
592 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
593 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
594 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
596 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
597 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
598 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
599 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
603 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
604 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
606 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
607 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
609 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
610 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
614 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
615 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
617 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
618 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
619 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
622 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
624 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
625 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
626 since synchronizing can take a long time.
628 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
630 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
631 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
633 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
635 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
636 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
637 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
641 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
642 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
645 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
649 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
650 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
652 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
653 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
654 is a non regular file.
655 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
657 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
658 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
659 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
661 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
662 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
664 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
665 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
667 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
668 heavily changed during the run.
669 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
671 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
672 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
674 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
675 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
677 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
678 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
680 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
681 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
683 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
684 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
685 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
687 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
688 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
690 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
691 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
693 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
694 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
695 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
697 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
698 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
699 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
701 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
702 invalid combinations of case character classes.
703 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
705 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
706 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
707 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
709 ** Changes in behavior
711 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
712 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
714 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
715 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
716 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
718 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
719 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
720 that was made in release 8.32.
722 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
723 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
724 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
726 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
727 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
729 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
730 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
734 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
735 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
736 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
737 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
739 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
741 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
742 when verifying tagged format checksums.
744 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
746 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
747 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
749 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
750 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
752 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
753 NUL instead of newline.
755 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
757 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
758 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
759 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
763 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
764 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
766 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
767 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
768 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
770 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
771 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
773 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
774 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
776 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
777 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
779 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
780 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
781 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
783 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
785 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
786 where avx2 instructions are supported.
787 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
790 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
794 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
795 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
796 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
798 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
799 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
800 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
801 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
802 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
804 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
805 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
806 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
807 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
808 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
809 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
811 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
812 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
814 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
815 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
816 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
817 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
819 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
820 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
821 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
822 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
824 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
825 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
827 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
828 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
829 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
830 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
832 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
833 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
834 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
836 ** Changes in behavior
838 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
839 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
840 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
841 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
842 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
845 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
846 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
847 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
848 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
849 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
850 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
851 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
852 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
855 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
856 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
857 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
858 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
860 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
861 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
862 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
864 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
865 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
869 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
870 file creation time, where available.
872 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
873 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
875 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
876 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
877 useful on network file systems.
881 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
882 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
884 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
885 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
886 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
890 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
893 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
897 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
898 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
900 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
901 after asking the user whether to proceed.
902 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
904 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
905 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
907 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
908 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
909 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
911 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
912 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
913 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
914 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
915 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
916 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
918 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
919 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
921 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
922 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
924 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
925 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
926 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
928 ** Changes in behavior
930 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
931 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
932 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
933 end-of-options marker.
935 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
938 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
939 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
941 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
942 environment variable is set.
944 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
945 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
946 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
947 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
948 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
950 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
952 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
953 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
954 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
955 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
957 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
958 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
962 id now supports specifying multiple users.
964 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
965 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
967 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
968 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
969 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
970 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
971 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
972 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
974 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
975 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
977 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
978 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
980 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
981 signal handling before executing a program.
985 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
986 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
987 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
991 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
992 which is common in Asian locales.
994 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
995 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
997 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
998 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
1001 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
1005 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
1006 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
1007 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
1008 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
1009 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
1010 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
1012 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
1013 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
1014 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
1015 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
1017 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
1018 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
1019 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
1020 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
1021 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
1022 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
1024 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
1025 even if it can't be traversed.
1026 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
1028 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
1029 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
1030 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
1032 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1035 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
1036 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
1037 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
1038 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
1039 now silently does nothing if A exists.
1040 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
1042 ** Changes in behavior
1044 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
1045 it is self referential.
1047 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
1051 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
1053 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
1054 each processing step.
1056 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
1057 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
1060 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
1061 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
1062 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
1064 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
1065 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
1069 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
1070 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
1072 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
1073 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
1074 and tail -f uses inotify.
1076 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
1077 which is especially significant on macOS.
1080 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
1084 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
1085 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
1087 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
1088 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
1089 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
1090 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
1092 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
1093 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1095 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
1096 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1098 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
1099 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
1100 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
1102 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
1103 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1105 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
1106 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
1107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1109 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
1110 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
1111 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
1112 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
1113 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1117 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
1121 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
1123 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
1124 rather than reading from the start.
1126 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
1127 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
1128 for unknown long options.
1132 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
1133 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
1136 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
1140 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
1141 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
1142 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
1143 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1145 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
1146 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
1147 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
1148 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
1149 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1151 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
1152 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
1153 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
1154 now fails instead of losing the data.
1155 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1157 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
1158 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
1159 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1161 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
1162 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1165 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
1166 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1167 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1169 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1170 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1171 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1173 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1174 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1175 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1177 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1178 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1179 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1181 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1182 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1183 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1185 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1186 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1187 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1189 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1192 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1193 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1194 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1196 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1197 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1199 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1200 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1201 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1202 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1204 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1205 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1206 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1208 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1209 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1210 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1212 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1213 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1217 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1218 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1219 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1221 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1222 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1224 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1225 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1227 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1228 executing the subsidiary program.
1230 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1232 ** Changes in behavior
1234 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1235 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1236 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1237 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1241 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1243 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1244 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1246 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1247 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1248 is effective in this case.
1251 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1255 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1256 as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
1257 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1259 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1260 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1261 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1263 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1264 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1265 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1267 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1268 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1269 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1271 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1272 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1273 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1275 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1276 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1277 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1278 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1279 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1281 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1282 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1283 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1284 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1288 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1289 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1290 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1291 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1293 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1294 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1295 time zone is indeterminate.
1297 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1298 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1299 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1300 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1302 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1303 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1304 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1306 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1307 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1309 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1310 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1311 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1315 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1316 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1317 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1320 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1324 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1325 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1328 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1329 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1330 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1332 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1333 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1334 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1335 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1336 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1338 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1339 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1340 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1342 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1343 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1345 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1346 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1347 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1349 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1350 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1351 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1353 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1354 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1356 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1357 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1358 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1360 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1361 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1363 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1364 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1365 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1367 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1369 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1370 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1372 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1373 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1375 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1376 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1378 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1379 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1381 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1382 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1383 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1384 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1386 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1387 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1388 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1390 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1391 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1392 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1394 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1395 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1396 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1398 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1399 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1400 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1402 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1403 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1405 ** Changes in behavior
1407 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1409 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1410 values for any argument.
1412 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1413 they are out of localtime range.
1415 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1416 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1417 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1418 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1422 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1423 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1424 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1426 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1427 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1429 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1430 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1432 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1434 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1435 written to a terminal.
1437 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1438 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1440 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1441 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1442 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1443 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1444 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1445 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1446 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1447 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1448 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1449 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1450 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1452 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1453 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1457 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1458 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1462 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1464 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1465 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1467 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1470 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1474 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1475 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1476 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1477 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1479 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1480 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1482 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1483 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1484 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1486 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1487 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1489 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1490 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1491 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1493 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1494 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1496 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1497 that specify an offset for the first field.
1498 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1500 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1501 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1505 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1506 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1510 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1511 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1513 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1514 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1515 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1516 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1517 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1519 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1520 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1521 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1523 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1524 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1525 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1527 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1528 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1530 ** Changes in behavior
1532 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1533 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1535 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1536 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1538 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1539 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1541 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1542 when outputting to a terminal.
1544 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1548 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1549 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1551 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1552 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1554 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1555 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1556 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1558 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1559 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1561 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1562 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1563 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1565 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1567 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1568 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1569 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1571 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1572 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1575 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1579 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1580 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1582 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1585 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1586 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1589 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1590 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1591 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1592 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1594 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1595 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1596 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1597 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1599 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1600 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1602 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1603 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1605 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1606 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1607 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1609 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1610 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1611 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1613 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1614 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1615 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1617 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1618 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1619 character at the 4GiB position.
1620 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1622 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1623 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1625 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1626 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1628 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1629 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1630 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1632 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1633 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1635 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1636 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1637 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1639 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1640 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1642 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1643 when those files are being created or renamed.
1644 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1648 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1649 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1650 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1651 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1653 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1654 on stderr approximately every second.
1656 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1657 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1659 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1660 other than the default newline character.
1662 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1663 a useful setting with high latency links.
1665 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1666 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1668 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1669 and output errors in general.
1671 ** Changes in behavior
1673 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1674 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1675 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1676 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1678 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1679 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1680 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1681 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1682 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1684 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1685 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1687 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1689 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1690 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1692 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1693 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1697 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1698 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1700 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1701 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1703 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1704 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1706 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1707 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1709 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1711 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1712 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1713 documentation are provided.
1716 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1720 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1721 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1723 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1724 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1725 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1726 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1728 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1729 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1730 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1731 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1733 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1734 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1736 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1737 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1739 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1740 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1741 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1742 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1743 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1744 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1745 values are in octal.
1758 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1760 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1761 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1762 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1763 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1764 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1765 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1767 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1768 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1769 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1770 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1772 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1773 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1774 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1776 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1777 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1778 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1779 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1781 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1782 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1783 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1785 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1786 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1787 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1789 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1790 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1791 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1792 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1793 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1795 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1796 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1797 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1799 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1800 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1802 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1803 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1804 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1806 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1807 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1809 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1810 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1812 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1813 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1815 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1816 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1818 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1819 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1820 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1822 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1823 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1827 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1828 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1830 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1831 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1832 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1833 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1834 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1835 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1836 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1837 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1838 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1839 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1840 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1841 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1842 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1843 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1844 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1845 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1846 it suitable for embedded system.
1848 ** Changes in behavior
1850 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1851 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1853 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1854 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1856 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1857 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1858 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1860 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1861 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1862 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1866 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1867 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1868 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1870 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1872 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1873 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1874 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1876 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1877 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1878 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1879 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1881 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1882 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1884 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1885 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1886 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1889 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1893 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
1894 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1895 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1897 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1898 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1899 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1900 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1902 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1903 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1904 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1906 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1907 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1909 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1911 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1912 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1913 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1915 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1916 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1917 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1919 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1920 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1921 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1922 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1924 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1925 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1926 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1928 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1929 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1930 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1932 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1933 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1935 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1936 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1937 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1938 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1940 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1941 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1942 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1944 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1945 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1946 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1950 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1951 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1952 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1954 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1955 used to identify the split points.
1957 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1958 command line argument through to the output.
1960 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1963 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1964 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1966 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1967 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1969 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1971 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1972 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1973 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1975 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1976 unique groups with empty lines.
1978 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1979 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1981 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1984 ** Changes in behavior
1986 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1987 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1988 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1989 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1991 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1992 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1994 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1995 not just the transfer counts.
1997 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1999 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
2000 as per the documented interface.
2004 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
2006 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
2007 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
2008 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
2009 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2011 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
2012 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
2013 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
2014 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
2016 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
2017 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
2018 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
2020 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
2021 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
2023 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
2024 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
2026 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
2030 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2033 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
2037 numfmt: reformat numbers
2041 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
2042 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
2043 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
2045 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
2046 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
2047 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
2049 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
2050 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
2054 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
2055 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2057 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
2058 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
2059 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2061 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
2062 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
2063 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2065 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
2066 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
2067 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2069 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
2070 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
2071 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
2073 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
2074 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
2075 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
2077 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
2078 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2080 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
2081 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
2083 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
2084 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
2085 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
2087 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
2088 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
2089 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2091 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
2092 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
2093 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2095 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
2096 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
2097 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
2098 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2100 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
2101 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
2102 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2104 ** Changes in behavior
2106 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
2107 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
2108 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
2109 'total' in the target column.
2111 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
2112 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
2113 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
2115 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
2116 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
2118 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
2119 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
2123 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
2124 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2126 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
2127 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
2129 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
2133 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
2134 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
2135 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
2136 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
2137 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
2138 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
2139 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
2140 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
2141 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
2142 for a patched distribution package.
2144 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
2145 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2147 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
2148 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
2149 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
2150 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2153 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
2157 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
2159 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
2160 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
2161 sha384sum and sha512sum.
2165 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
2166 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2167 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2168 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2169 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2171 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2172 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2174 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2175 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2176 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2177 eventually exits nonzero.
2179 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2180 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2181 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2182 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2183 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2185 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2186 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2187 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2189 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2190 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2191 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2193 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2194 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2195 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2197 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2198 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2199 Before, this would infloop:
2200 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2201 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2203 ** Changes in behavior
2205 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2209 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2210 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2211 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2212 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2213 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2216 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2217 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2218 format-changing options.
2220 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2221 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2222 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2223 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2224 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2228 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2229 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2230 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2231 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2232 are run without following the instructions in README.
2234 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2235 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2236 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2237 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2238 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2239 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2240 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2243 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2247 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2248 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2249 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2250 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2252 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2253 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2254 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2255 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2257 sort -u could read freed memory.
2258 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2259 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2260 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2264 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2265 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2266 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2267 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2270 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2274 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2275 processes will not intersperse their output.
2276 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2278 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2279 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2280 date: invalid date '\260'
2281 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2283 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2284 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2285 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2286 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2288 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2289 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2290 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2292 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2293 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2294 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2295 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2296 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2297 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2299 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2302 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2303 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2305 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2306 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2307 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2309 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2310 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2311 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2315 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2317 ** Changes in behavior
2319 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2320 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2321 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2322 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2323 have any reason to include it here.
2327 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2328 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2329 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2331 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2332 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2333 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2336 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2340 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2341 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2342 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2343 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2344 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2345 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2347 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2348 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2349 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2350 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2351 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2352 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2353 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2355 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2356 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2358 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2359 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2363 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2364 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2366 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2368 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2370 ** Changes in behavior
2372 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2373 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2374 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2376 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2377 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2380 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2384 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2385 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2386 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2387 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2388 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2389 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2390 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2391 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2393 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2394 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2395 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2396 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2397 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2399 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2400 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2402 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2403 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2405 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2406 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2408 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2409 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2411 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2412 additional static suffix to output file names.
2414 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2415 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2416 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2418 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2419 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2423 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2424 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2425 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2427 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2428 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2429 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2430 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2431 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2432 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2434 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2435 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2436 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2437 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2438 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2440 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2441 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2442 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2443 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2447 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2448 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2449 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2451 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2452 instead of causing a usage failure.
2454 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2457 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2461 realpath: print resolved file names.
2465 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2466 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2468 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2469 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2471 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2472 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2473 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2474 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2475 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2476 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2478 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2479 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2480 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2482 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2483 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2484 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2486 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2487 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2488 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2489 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2490 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2492 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2494 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2495 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2497 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2498 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2499 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2501 ** Changes in behavior
2503 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2504 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2505 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2506 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2507 usually-short referent instead.
2509 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2510 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2511 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2512 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2515 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2519 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2520 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2521 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2523 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2524 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2526 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2527 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2531 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2532 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2534 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2535 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2536 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2537 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2539 ** Changes in behavior
2541 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2542 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2543 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2547 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2548 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2549 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2552 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2556 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2557 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2558 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2560 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2561 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2563 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2564 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2565 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2566 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2567 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2569 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2570 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2571 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2572 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2573 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2574 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2575 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2576 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2578 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2579 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2581 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2582 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2584 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2585 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2587 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2588 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2589 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2591 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2592 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2593 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2594 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2596 ** Changes in behavior
2598 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2599 when -v or -c specified.
2601 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2602 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2606 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2607 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2608 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2609 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2610 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2612 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2613 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2614 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2616 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2617 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2618 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2619 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2620 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2621 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2622 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2624 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2625 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2626 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2630 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2631 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2633 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2636 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2637 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2639 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2640 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2642 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2643 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2645 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2647 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2651 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2652 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2654 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2657 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2661 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2662 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2664 ** Changes in behavior
2666 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2667 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2668 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2669 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2670 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2671 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2672 resolved for 2.6.39.
2673 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2674 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2675 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2679 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2682 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2686 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2687 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2688 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2690 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2691 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2692 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2694 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2695 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2696 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2698 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2699 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2701 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2702 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2704 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2705 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2707 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2708 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2712 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2713 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2714 processed portion thereof.
2716 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2717 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2719 ** Changes in behavior
2721 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2722 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2723 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2725 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2726 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2727 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2729 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2730 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2732 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2733 Use --preserve-context instead.
2735 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2738 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2742 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2743 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2744 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2745 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2746 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2748 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2749 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2751 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2752 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2753 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2755 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2756 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2758 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2759 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2763 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2764 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2765 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2766 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2767 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2768 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2769 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2770 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2772 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2773 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2774 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2776 ** Changes in behavior
2778 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2779 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2780 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2783 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2787 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2788 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2789 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2792 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2796 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2797 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2799 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2800 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2802 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2803 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2805 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2806 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2807 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2808 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2810 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2811 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2813 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2814 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2815 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2817 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2819 ** Changes in behavior
2821 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2822 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2823 to the number of available processors.
2827 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2828 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2829 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2832 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2836 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2837 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2838 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2839 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2841 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2842 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2843 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2845 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2846 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2848 ** Changes in behavior
2850 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2851 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2853 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2854 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2855 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2856 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2857 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2858 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2860 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2861 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2862 the same way as the others.
2864 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2865 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2868 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2872 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2873 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2874 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2876 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2877 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2879 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2880 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2881 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2883 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2884 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2886 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2887 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2889 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2890 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2891 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2893 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2894 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2895 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2896 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2900 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2901 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2903 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2906 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2907 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2909 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2911 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2912 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2913 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2915 ** Changes in behavior
2917 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2918 rather than its aliased target.
2920 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2921 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2922 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2924 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2925 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2926 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2927 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2928 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2929 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2930 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2931 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2933 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2935 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2937 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2938 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2941 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2942 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2943 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2944 control like taskset for example.
2946 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2948 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2949 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2950 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2951 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2952 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2953 includes %C when context information is available.
2955 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2956 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2957 rather than a file system attribute.
2959 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2960 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2961 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2962 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2964 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2965 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2966 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2968 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2969 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2970 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2973 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2977 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2978 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2980 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2982 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2983 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2985 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2986 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2987 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2988 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2990 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2991 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2992 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2996 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2997 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2999 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
3000 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
3001 duration after the initial signal was sent.
3003 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
3004 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
3005 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
3006 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
3007 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
3008 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
3009 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
3010 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
3011 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
3013 ** Changes in behavior
3015 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
3016 sequence when it would be a no-op.
3018 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
3019 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
3022 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
3026 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
3027 of available processors, which may not have been the case
3028 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
3029 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3033 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
3034 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
3036 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
3037 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
3038 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
3039 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
3041 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
3042 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
3043 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
3046 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
3050 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
3051 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
3052 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
3054 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
3055 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
3056 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
3058 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
3059 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3061 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
3062 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3063 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
3064 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3066 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
3067 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
3068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3070 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
3071 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
3072 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
3073 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3075 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
3076 renamed-aside and then recreated.
3077 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3079 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
3080 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
3081 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
3082 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3084 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
3085 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
3086 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3088 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
3089 processes will not intersperse their output.
3090 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
3093 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
3097 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
3098 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3100 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
3101 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3103 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
3104 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3105 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
3106 the presence of the empty string argument.
3107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3109 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3110 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
3111 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
3112 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3114 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
3115 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3117 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3118 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
3119 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3121 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
3122 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
3123 and with a malicious user on the same system
3124 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
3125 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
3128 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
3132 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
3133 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
3134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3136 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
3137 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
3138 offending directory and all "contents."
3140 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
3141 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
3142 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
3144 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
3145 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
3146 without capabilities were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3148 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
3149 processes will not intersperse their output.
3150 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3151 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3153 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
3154 output the name of the file to stdout.
3155 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3157 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
3158 call fails with errno == EACCES.
3159 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3161 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
3162 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
3165 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
3166 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3167 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3169 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3170 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3171 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3172 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3173 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3174 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3176 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3177 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3178 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3179 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3181 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3182 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3184 ** Changes in behavior
3186 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3187 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3188 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3189 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3190 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3192 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3193 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3194 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3195 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3197 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3199 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3200 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3201 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3202 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3203 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3207 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3211 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3212 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3214 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3215 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3217 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3218 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3219 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3221 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3222 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3225 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3229 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3230 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3231 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3233 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3234 to accommodate leap seconds.
3235 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3237 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3238 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3239 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3241 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3243 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3244 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3245 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3247 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3248 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3249 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3250 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3251 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3255 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3256 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3257 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3258 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3260 ** Changes in behavior
3262 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3263 environment variable is set.
3265 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3266 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3267 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3271 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3272 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3273 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3274 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3276 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3277 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3278 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3279 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3283 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3284 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3285 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3287 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3288 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3289 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3290 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3291 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3292 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3293 another improvement:
3295 rm -r is now slightly more standard-conforming when operating on
3296 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3299 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3303 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3304 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3305 and libraries tested at configure time.
3306 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3308 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3309 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3311 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3312 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3314 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3315 printing a summary to stderr.
3316 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3318 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3319 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3320 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3322 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3323 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3325 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3326 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3327 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3328 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3330 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3331 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3332 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3333 which is relatively unusual.
3334 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3336 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3337 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3338 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3339 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3340 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3341 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3342 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3346 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3347 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3348 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3349 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3350 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3354 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3355 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3357 ** Changes in behavior
3359 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3360 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3361 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3362 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3363 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3366 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3370 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3371 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3373 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3374 before data copying has started.
3376 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3377 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3379 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3380 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3381 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3382 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3384 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3385 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3386 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3387 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3389 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3394 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3395 for its standard streams.
3397 ** Changes in behavior
3399 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3400 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3401 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3402 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3403 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3404 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3406 ** Deprecated options
3408 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3409 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3413 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3415 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3416 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3417 a btrfs file system.
3419 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3421 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3422 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3424 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3425 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3428 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3432 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3433 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3434 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3435 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3437 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3438 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3439 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3440 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3441 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3446 make check: two tests have been corrected
3450 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3451 inherited from gnulib.
3454 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3458 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3459 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3460 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3461 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3463 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3464 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3466 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3468 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3469 systems without xattr support.
3471 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3472 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3473 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3475 ** Changes in behavior
3477 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3478 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3479 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3480 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3482 ** Improved robustness
3484 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3485 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3486 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3487 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3488 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3489 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3490 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3491 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3492 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3496 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3497 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3499 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3500 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3501 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3502 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3503 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3506 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3510 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3511 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3512 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3516 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3517 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3518 data was read, or on process exit.
3519 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3521 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3522 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3523 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3524 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3526 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3527 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3528 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3529 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3531 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3532 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3534 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3535 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3537 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3538 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3539 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3541 ** Changes in behavior
3543 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3544 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3545 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3547 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3548 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3550 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3551 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3552 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3555 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3559 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3561 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3562 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3563 install: Never copies xattrs
3565 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3566 from overwriting any existing destination file
3568 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3569 mode where this feature is available.
3571 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3572 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3573 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3574 do not modify the destination at all.
3576 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3578 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3582 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3583 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3585 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3587 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3588 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3590 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3591 processing the first file name
3593 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3594 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3595 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3596 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3598 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3599 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3601 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3602 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3605 ** Changes in behavior
3607 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3608 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3610 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3611 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3612 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3614 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3615 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3617 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3619 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3620 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3621 is still marked with a '+'.
3624 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3628 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3629 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3633 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3634 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3635 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3636 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3637 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3638 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3640 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3641 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3643 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3644 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3646 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3648 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3649 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3650 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3652 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3653 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3655 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3656 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3657 used to factor large numbers.
3659 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3662 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3664 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3666 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3667 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3669 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3670 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3671 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3672 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3674 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3675 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3676 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3678 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3679 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3683 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3685 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3686 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3688 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3689 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3691 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3693 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3694 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3698 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3699 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3700 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3702 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3704 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3705 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3706 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3708 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3709 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3710 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3712 ** Changes in behavior
3714 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3715 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3718 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3722 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3723 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3724 'futimens' system calls.
3728 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3730 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3731 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3732 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3734 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3735 with no USERNAME argument.
3737 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3738 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3739 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3741 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3742 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3743 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3744 number of fields for some inputs.
3746 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3747 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3749 ** Changes in behavior
3751 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3752 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3755 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3759 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3761 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3762 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3763 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3764 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3766 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3767 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3769 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3770 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3772 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3773 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3775 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3776 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3777 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3778 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3780 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3781 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3782 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3783 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3784 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3785 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3787 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3788 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3790 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3791 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3792 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3794 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3795 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3797 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3798 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3800 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3801 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3802 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3803 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3805 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3806 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3808 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3809 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3811 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3812 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3813 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3817 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3818 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3820 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3821 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3822 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3823 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3827 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3828 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3830 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3832 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3836 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3837 which have negative errno values.
3841 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3845 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3849 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3850 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3853 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3857 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3858 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3859 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3861 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3862 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3863 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3864 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3868 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3869 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3870 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3871 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3874 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3878 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3880 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3881 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3882 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3885 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3889 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3890 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3892 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3894 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3896 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3898 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3902 ** Changes in behavior
3904 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3905 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3907 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3908 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3910 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3911 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3912 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3916 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3917 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3918 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3919 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3920 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3921 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3922 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3923 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3924 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3925 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3926 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3928 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3929 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3930 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3933 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3936 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3937 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3938 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3940 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3941 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3942 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3945 ** New build options
3947 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3948 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3949 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3950 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3952 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3953 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3954 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3955 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3956 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3957 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3958 of "make check" fail.
3960 ** Remove deprecated options
3962 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3963 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3964 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3965 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3966 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3968 ** Improved robustness
3970 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3971 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3972 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3973 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3974 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3975 loss of the contents of a/f.
3977 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3978 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3982 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3983 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3984 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3986 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3987 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3988 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3989 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3991 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3992 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3993 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3994 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3995 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3996 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3997 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3998 destination is a symlink.
4000 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
4002 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
4003 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
4005 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
4006 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
4008 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
4010 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
4011 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
4013 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
4014 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
4016 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
4019 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
4020 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
4022 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
4023 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
4025 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
4026 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
4027 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
4028 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4030 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
4031 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
4032 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4034 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
4035 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
4036 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
4038 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
4039 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
4040 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
4041 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
4043 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
4044 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
4045 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
4047 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
4048 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
4050 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
4051 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
4053 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
4055 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
4056 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
4057 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
4059 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
4060 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
4062 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
4063 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
4065 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
4066 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
4068 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
4069 [present in the original version]
4072 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
4076 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
4078 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
4079 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
4080 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
4082 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
4083 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
4085 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
4089 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
4090 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
4092 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
4093 support but with insufficient /proc support.
4095 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
4096 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
4098 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
4099 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
4100 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
4101 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
4102 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
4103 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
4105 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
4106 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
4109 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
4110 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
4112 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
4115 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
4116 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
4117 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
4119 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
4120 directory is unreadable.
4122 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
4123 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
4124 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
4126 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
4127 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
4128 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
4129 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
4130 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
4133 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
4134 Before it would print nothing.
4136 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
4138 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
4139 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
4140 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
4141 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
4142 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
4143 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
4144 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
4145 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
4147 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
4151 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
4152 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
4153 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
4155 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
4156 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
4157 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
4158 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
4161 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
4165 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
4166 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4167 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4168 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4169 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4170 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4171 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4173 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4174 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4175 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4176 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4177 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4178 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4179 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4180 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4182 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4183 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4184 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4187 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4191 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4192 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4194 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4195 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4196 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4198 ** Improved robustness
4200 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4201 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4202 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4205 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4209 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4210 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4211 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4212 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4213 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4215 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4219 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4222 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4226 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4227 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4228 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4229 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4231 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4232 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4234 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4235 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4236 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4239 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4241 ** Improved robustness
4243 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4244 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4246 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4247 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4248 or NFS-mounted partition.
4250 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4251 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4255 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4256 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4257 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4258 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4259 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4260 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4262 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4263 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4265 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4266 or neglect to report file removal.
4268 For the "groups" command:
4270 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4271 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4273 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4275 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4277 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4281 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4282 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4285 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4287 ** Changes in behavior
4289 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4290 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4291 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4292 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4294 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4295 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4296 a final './' or '../' component.
4298 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4299 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4300 this only for pipes.
4302 ** Infrastructure changes
4304 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4305 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4306 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4307 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4311 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4312 name is "." or "..".
4314 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4315 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4316 dirent.d_type support.
4318 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4319 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4321 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4322 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4323 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4324 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4327 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4329 ** Changes in behavior
4331 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4335 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4336 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4340 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4341 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4342 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4344 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4345 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4347 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4348 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4350 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4352 ** Improved robustness
4354 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4355 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4356 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4358 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4359 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4362 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4363 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4365 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4366 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4368 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4369 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4371 ** Changes in behavior
4373 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4374 where the two are distinct.
4376 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4377 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4378 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4379 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4380 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4381 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4382 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4383 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4384 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4385 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4386 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4387 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4388 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4389 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4390 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4391 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4392 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4394 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4395 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4396 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4398 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4399 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4400 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4401 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4404 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4405 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4409 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4410 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4411 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4412 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4414 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4415 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4416 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4418 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4419 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4420 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4421 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4422 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4425 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4426 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4428 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4429 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4430 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4431 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4433 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4434 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4435 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4437 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4438 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4439 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4440 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4442 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4443 and sticky) with the -m option.
4445 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4446 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4447 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4448 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4449 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4451 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4452 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4454 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4458 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4459 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4460 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4461 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4463 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4465 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4467 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4468 silently ignoring one of them.
4470 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4471 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4472 containing this change was 5.92.
4474 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4475 automatically newline terminated.
4477 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4478 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4479 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4480 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4483 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4484 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4485 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4488 ** Scheduled for removal
4490 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4491 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4493 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4494 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4495 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4496 command to unlink a directory.
4498 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4499 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4500 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4501 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4505 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4506 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4507 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4508 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4509 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4510 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4514 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4515 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4517 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4519 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4520 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4521 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4523 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4524 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4527 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4528 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4530 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4531 list directories before files.
4533 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4534 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4535 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4536 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4539 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4541 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4543 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4544 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4545 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4547 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4548 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4552 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4553 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4554 usually printing nothing.
4556 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4558 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4559 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4560 them with hard-linked directories.
4562 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4563 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4564 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4566 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4567 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4568 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4570 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4573 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4574 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4576 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4577 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4579 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4580 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4582 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4583 all command-line arguments.
4585 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4587 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4589 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4590 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4592 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4594 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4595 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4596 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4597 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4598 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4600 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4601 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4603 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4604 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4605 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4606 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4608 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4610 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4614 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4615 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4617 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4618 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4620 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4621 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4623 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4624 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4626 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4627 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4629 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4631 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4632 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4633 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4636 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4638 ** Build-related bug fixes
4640 installing .mo files would fail
4643 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4647 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4649 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4652 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4656 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4657 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4661 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4663 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4664 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4666 ** Deprecated options
4668 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4669 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4671 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4675 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4677 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4678 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4679 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4680 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4682 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4685 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4691 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4696 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4698 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4700 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4701 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4702 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4704 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4705 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4706 problematic usages. These include:
4708 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4709 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4710 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4711 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4712 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4713 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4714 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4715 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4716 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4718 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4719 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4721 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4722 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4723 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4724 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4726 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4727 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4728 between binary and text files.
4730 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4734 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4738 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4739 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4741 head tac tail tee tr
4742 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4744 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4745 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4747 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4748 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4749 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4751 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4753 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4755 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4756 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4757 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4761 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4763 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4764 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4766 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4767 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4768 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4772 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4773 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4777 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4778 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4779 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4783 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4784 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4788 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4790 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4792 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4796 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4797 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4798 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4800 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4801 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4802 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4803 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4804 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4806 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4810 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4811 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4812 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4814 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4816 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4817 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4818 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4819 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4821 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4823 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4824 rather than silently wrapping around.
4826 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4827 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4829 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4830 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4832 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4833 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4834 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4835 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4837 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4839 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4841 ** Improved robustness
4843 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4844 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4845 no matter how large the result.
4847 ** Improved portability
4849 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4850 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4852 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4854 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4855 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4856 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4858 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4859 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4863 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4864 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4866 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4868 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4869 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4870 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4871 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4873 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4874 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4876 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4877 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4878 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4880 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4882 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4883 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4885 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4886 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4888 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4890 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4891 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4893 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4894 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4896 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4897 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4898 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4900 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4902 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4904 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4908 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4910 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4911 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4912 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4914 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4915 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4917 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4918 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4919 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4921 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4922 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4924 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4925 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4926 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4927 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4929 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4930 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4932 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4933 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4934 the file system does not support it.
4936 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4938 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4939 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4941 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4943 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4944 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4946 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4947 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4948 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4949 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4951 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4952 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4955 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4956 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4957 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4958 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4960 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4961 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4962 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4963 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4965 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4966 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4968 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4970 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4971 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4972 reporting incorrect results.
4976 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4977 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4979 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4982 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4984 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4985 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4987 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4988 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4990 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4993 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4994 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4995 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4996 the file name does not look like a page range.
4998 printf has several changes:
5000 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
5001 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
5003 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
5004 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
5005 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
5007 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
5008 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
5011 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
5012 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
5014 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
5015 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
5017 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
5019 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
5020 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
5022 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
5024 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
5026 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
5027 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
5028 when first encountering the directory.
5032 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
5033 output; POSIX requires this.
5035 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
5036 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
5038 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
5040 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
5041 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
5043 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
5044 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
5046 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
5047 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
5048 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
5049 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
5050 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
5051 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
5052 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
5054 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
5055 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
5056 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
5058 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
5059 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
5061 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
5063 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
5065 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
5066 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
5067 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
5068 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
5070 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
5074 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
5075 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
5076 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
5077 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
5078 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
5080 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
5081 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
5082 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
5084 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
5085 is longer than PATH_MAX.
5087 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
5088 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
5090 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
5091 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
5092 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
5093 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
5094 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
5096 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
5097 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
5099 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
5100 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
5102 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
5104 nocreat do not create the output file
5105 excl fail if the output file already exists
5106 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
5107 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
5109 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
5111 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
5112 direct use direct I/O for data
5113 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
5114 sync likewise, but also for metadata
5115 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
5116 nofollow do not follow symlinks
5117 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
5119 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
5121 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
5122 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
5125 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
5126 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
5127 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
5128 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
5129 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
5130 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
5132 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
5133 list of NUL-terminated file names.
5135 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
5138 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
5140 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
5142 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
5143 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
5145 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
5146 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
5147 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
5149 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
5150 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
5151 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
5153 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
5155 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
5156 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
5158 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
5159 for compatibility with bash.
5161 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
5163 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
5164 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
5165 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
5166 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5168 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5169 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5171 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5172 ls supports TABSIZE.
5173 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5174 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5175 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5177 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5180 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5182 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5183 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5184 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5185 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5186 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5187 an offset, not as a file name.
5189 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5190 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5192 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5193 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5195 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5196 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5198 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5199 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5200 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5202 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5203 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5205 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5206 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5210 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5212 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5214 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5218 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5219 or more arguments between partitions.
5221 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5222 holes in the destination.
5224 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5225 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5226 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5227 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5228 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5229 terminates immediately.
5231 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5233 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5235 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5236 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5237 not the empty string.
5239 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5240 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5244 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5245 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5246 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5249 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5256 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5260 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5261 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5263 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5264 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5266 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5267 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5268 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5271 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5275 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5276 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5278 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5279 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5281 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5282 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5283 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5285 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5287 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5290 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5292 ** Configuration option
5294 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5295 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5299 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5300 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5304 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5305 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5306 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5309 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5310 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5311 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5312 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5313 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5314 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5315 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5318 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5322 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5323 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5324 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5326 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5327 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5329 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5331 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5332 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5333 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5334 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5336 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5338 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5339 not just the ones that reference directories
5341 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5342 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5344 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5345 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5346 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5348 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5349 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5350 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5351 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5352 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5353 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5355 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5360 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5361 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5363 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5365 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5367 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5369 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5370 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5372 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5373 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5375 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5377 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5381 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5383 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5385 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5386 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5387 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5388 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5389 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5391 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5392 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5394 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5395 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5397 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5398 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5400 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5401 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5402 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5406 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5407 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5408 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5409 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5410 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5411 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5412 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5413 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5414 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5415 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5416 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5417 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5418 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5419 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5421 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5423 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5424 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5426 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5428 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5430 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5431 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5433 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5435 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5436 without a trailing newline.
5438 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5439 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5441 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5444 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5448 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5450 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5452 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5453 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5454 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5455 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5457 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5459 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5460 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5461 be printed without leading spaces.
5463 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5464 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5469 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5470 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5471 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5473 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5475 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5476 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5478 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5479 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5481 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5482 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5484 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5486 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5488 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5490 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5491 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5493 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5495 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5497 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5498 byte offsets are specified.
5501 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5504 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5507 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5508 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5509 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5510 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5511 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5512 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5513 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5514 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5515 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5516 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5517 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5518 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5519 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5520 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5521 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5522 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5523 directory where M has write access.
5524 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5525 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5526 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5529 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5530 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5531 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5532 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5533 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5534 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5535 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5536 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5537 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5538 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5539 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5540 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5541 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5542 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5543 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5544 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5545 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5546 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5547 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5548 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5549 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5550 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5551 appeared one additional time.
5553 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5554 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5555 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5556 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5559 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5560 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5561 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5562 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5563 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5564 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5565 if there were more than 338.
5567 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5568 - false --help now exits nonzero
5571 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5572 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5573 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5574 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5577 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5578 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5579 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5580 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5581 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5584 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5585 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5586 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5587 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5588 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5589 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5590 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5593 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5594 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5595 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5596 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5597 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5598 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5600 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5601 under certain unusual conditions
5602 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5603 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5606 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5607 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5608 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5609 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5610 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5611 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5612 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5613 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5614 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5615 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5616 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5617 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5618 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5619 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5620 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5621 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5624 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5625 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5628 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5629 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5630 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5631 involving hard-linked directories
5632 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5633 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5634 character-special and block files
5637 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5638 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5639 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5640 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5641 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5642 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5643 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5644 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5645 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5647 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5648 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5649 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5650 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5651 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5652 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5653 specified on the command line.
5654 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5655 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5656 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5657 the first file untouched.
5658 * readlink: new program
5659 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5660 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5661 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5662 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5663 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5664 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5667 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5668 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5669 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5670 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5671 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5672 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5673 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5674 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5675 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5676 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5677 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5678 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5680 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5681 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5682 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5684 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5685 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5686 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5687 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5688 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5689 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5690 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5691 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5694 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5695 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5698 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5699 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5700 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5701 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5702 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5703 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5704 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5707 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5708 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5710 ========================================================================
5711 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5712 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5715 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5717 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5718 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5719 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5720 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5721 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5722 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5723 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5724 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5725 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5726 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5727 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5728 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5730 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5731 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5732 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5733 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5735 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5738 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5740 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5741 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5742 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5743 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5744 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5745 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5746 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5749 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5750 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5751 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5752 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5753 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5754 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5755 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5756 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5757 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5758 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5759 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5760 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5761 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5762 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5763 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5764 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5766 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5767 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5769 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5770 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5771 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5772 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5773 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5774 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5776 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5777 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5778 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5779 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5780 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5781 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5782 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5784 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5785 the source files in the following example:
5786 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5787 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5788 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5789 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5790 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5791 links between source files with --preserve=links
5792 * cp accepts new options:
5793 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5794 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5795 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5796 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5797 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5798 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5799 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5800 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5801 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5803 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5804 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5805 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5806 even though it's older than dest.
5807 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5808 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5809 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5810 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5811 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5813 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5814 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5815 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5816 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5817 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5818 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5819 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5821 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5822 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5823 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5825 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5826 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5827 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5828 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5829 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5830 This is the default.
5832 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5833 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5834 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5835 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5836 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5838 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5841 ========================================================================
5842 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5843 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5846 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5847 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5849 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5850 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5851 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5852 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5853 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5855 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5856 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5857 that specifies a non-directory
5860 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5861 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5862 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5863 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5864 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5865 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5866 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5867 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5868 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5869 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5870 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5871 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5872 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5873 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5874 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5875 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5876 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5877 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5878 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5879 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5880 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5881 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5882 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5883 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5885 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5886 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5887 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5889 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5891 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5892 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5894 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5895 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5896 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5897 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5898 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5900 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5901 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5902 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5903 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5904 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5906 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5908 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5909 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5910 * still more portability fixes
5911 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5912 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5914 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5916 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5918 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5920 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5921 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5922 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5923 there is any time remaining
5924 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5926 ========================================================================
5927 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5928 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5930 This package began as the union of the following:
5931 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5933 ========================================================================
5935 Copyright (C) 2001-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5937 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5938 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5939 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5940 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5941 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5942 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.