1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
8 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
9 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
11 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
12 presented with malformed checksum lines.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
15 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
16 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
19 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
20 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
23 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
26 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
27 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
28 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
31 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
32 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
33 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
35 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
36 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
39 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
40 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
42 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
43 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
44 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
46 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
47 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
48 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
49 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
51 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
52 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
54 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
55 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
56 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
58 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
59 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
60 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
62 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
63 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
64 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
66 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
67 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
70 ** Changes in behavior
72 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
73 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
74 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
76 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
77 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
78 checksum utilities with cksum.
80 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
81 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
82 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
83 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
84 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
85 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
89 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
90 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
91 reinstating that behaviour from coreutils-9.0.
93 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
94 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
96 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
97 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
99 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
101 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
103 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
104 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
106 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
107 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
110 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
111 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
112 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
113 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
114 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
115 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
118 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
122 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
123 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
124 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
125 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
126 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
128 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
129 Previousy it may have issued "File exists" errors when
130 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
131 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
133 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
134 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
135 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
137 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
138 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
139 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
140 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
142 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
143 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
145 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
146 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
149 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
150 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
151 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
152 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
154 ** Changes in behavior
156 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
157 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
158 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
159 due to -n, -i, or -u.
163 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
164 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
165 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
168 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
172 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
173 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
174 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
175 total line in this case.
176 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
178 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
179 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
182 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
183 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
185 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
186 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
187 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
190 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
191 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
192 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
193 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
194 which may have resulted in data corruption.
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
197 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
198 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
199 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
201 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
202 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
204 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
205 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
206 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
208 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
209 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
210 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
212 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
213 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
214 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
216 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
217 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
218 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
219 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
220 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
222 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
223 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
224 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
225 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
226 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
228 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
229 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
230 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
232 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
233 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
234 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
236 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
237 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
238 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
241 ** Changes in behavior
243 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
244 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
245 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
246 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
247 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
248 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
250 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
251 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
253 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
254 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
255 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
256 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
258 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
259 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
260 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
262 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
263 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
264 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
265 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
267 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
268 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
269 This behavior is now documented.
271 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
272 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
274 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
275 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
276 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
278 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
279 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
280 from errors from the invoked command.
282 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
283 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
284 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
287 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
291 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
292 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
294 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
295 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
297 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
298 print details on how a file is being copied.
300 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
301 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
303 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
304 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
306 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
307 asked to move a file to a different file system.
309 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
310 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
312 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
313 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
315 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
316 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
320 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
321 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
322 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
323 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
324 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
326 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
327 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
329 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
330 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
332 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
333 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
334 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
336 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
337 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
338 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
340 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
341 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
343 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
344 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
345 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
346 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
349 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
353 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
354 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
355 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
357 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
358 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
359 before adjusting it to the correct value.
360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
362 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
363 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
366 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
367 and B is in some other file system.
368 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
370 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
371 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
372 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
374 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
377 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
378 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
379 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
380 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
381 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
383 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
384 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
387 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
388 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
389 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
391 ** Changes in behavior
393 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
394 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
395 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
397 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
398 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
399 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
400 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
402 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
403 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
405 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
406 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
407 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
409 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
410 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
412 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
413 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
414 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
415 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
416 though they still work.
418 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
419 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
420 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
422 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
423 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
425 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
426 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
427 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
429 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
430 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
431 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
432 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
436 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
437 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
439 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
440 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
442 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
443 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
447 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
448 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
450 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
451 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
452 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
455 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
457 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
458 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
459 since synchronizing can take a long time.
461 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
463 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
464 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
466 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
468 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
469 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
470 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
474 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
475 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
478 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
482 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
485 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
486 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
487 is a non regular file.
488 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
490 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
491 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
492 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
494 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
495 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
497 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
498 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
500 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
501 heavily changed during the run.
502 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
504 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
505 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
507 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
510 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
511 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
513 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
516 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
517 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
518 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
520 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
521 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
523 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
524 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
526 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
527 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
528 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
530 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
531 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
532 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
534 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
535 invalid combinations of case character classes.
536 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
538 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
539 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
540 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
542 ** Changes in behavior
544 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
545 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
547 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
548 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
549 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
551 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
552 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
553 that was made in release 8.32.
555 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
556 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
557 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
559 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
560 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
562 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
563 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
567 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
568 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
569 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
570 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
572 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
574 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
575 when verifying tagged format checksums.
577 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
579 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
580 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
582 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
583 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
585 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
586 NUL instead of newline.
588 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
590 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
591 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
592 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
596 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
597 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
599 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
600 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
601 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
603 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
604 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
606 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
607 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
609 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
610 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
612 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
613 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
614 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
616 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
618 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
619 where avx2 instructions are supported.
620 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
623 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
627 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
628 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
629 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
631 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
632 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
633 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
634 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
635 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
637 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
638 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
639 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
640 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
641 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
642 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
644 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
645 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
647 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
648 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
649 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
650 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
652 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
653 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
654 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
655 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
657 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
658 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
660 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
661 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
662 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
663 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
665 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
666 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
667 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
669 ** Changes in behavior
671 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
672 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
673 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
674 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
675 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
678 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
679 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
680 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
681 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
682 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
683 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
684 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
685 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
688 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
689 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
690 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
691 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
693 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
694 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
695 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
697 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
698 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
702 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
703 file creation time, where available.
705 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
706 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
708 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
709 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
710 useful on network file systems.
714 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
715 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
717 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
718 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
719 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
723 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
726 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
730 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
731 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
733 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
734 after asking the user whether to proceed.
735 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
737 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
738 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
740 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
741 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
742 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
744 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
745 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
746 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
747 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
748 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
749 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
751 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
752 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
754 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
755 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
757 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
758 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
759 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
761 ** Changes in behavior
763 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
764 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
765 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
766 end-of-options marker.
768 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
771 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
772 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
774 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
775 environment variable is set.
777 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
778 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
779 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
780 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
781 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
783 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
785 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
786 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
787 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
788 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
790 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
791 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
795 id now supports specifying multiple users.
797 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
798 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
800 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
801 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
802 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
803 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
804 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
805 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
807 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
808 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
810 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
811 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
813 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
814 signal handling before executing a program.
818 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
819 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
820 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
824 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
825 which is common in Asian locales.
827 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
828 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
830 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
831 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
834 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
838 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
839 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
840 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
841 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
842 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
843 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
845 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
846 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
847 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
848 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
850 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
851 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
852 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
853 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
854 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
855 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
857 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
858 even if it can't be traversed.
859 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
861 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
862 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
863 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
865 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
866 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
868 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
869 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
870 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
871 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
872 now silently does nothing if A exists.
873 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
875 ** Changes in behavior
877 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
878 it is self referential.
880 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
884 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
886 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
887 each processing step.
889 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
890 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
893 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
894 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
895 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
897 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
898 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
902 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
903 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
905 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
906 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
907 and tail -f uses inotify.
909 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
910 which is especially significant on macOS.
913 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
917 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
918 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
920 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
921 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
922 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
923 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
925 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
926 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
928 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
929 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
931 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
932 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
933 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
935 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
936 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
938 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
939 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
940 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
942 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
943 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
944 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
945 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
946 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
950 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
954 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
956 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
957 rather than reading from the start.
959 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
960 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
961 for unknown long options.
965 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
966 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
969 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
973 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
974 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
975 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
976 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
978 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
979 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
980 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
981 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
982 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
984 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
985 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
986 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
987 now fails instead of losing the data.
988 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
990 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
991 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
992 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
994 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
995 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
998 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
999 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1002 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1003 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1006 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1007 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1008 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1010 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1011 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1012 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1014 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1015 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1016 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1018 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1019 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1020 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1022 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1023 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1025 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1026 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1027 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1029 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1030 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1032 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1033 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1034 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1035 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1037 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1038 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1039 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1041 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1042 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1043 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1045 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1046 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1050 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1051 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1052 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1054 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1055 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1057 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1058 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1060 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1061 executing the subsidiary program.
1063 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1065 ** Changes in behavior
1067 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1068 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1069 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1070 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1074 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1076 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1077 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1079 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1080 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1081 is effective in this case.
1084 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1088 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1089 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
1090 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1092 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1093 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1094 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1096 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1097 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1098 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1100 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1101 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1102 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1104 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1105 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1106 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1108 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1109 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1110 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1111 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1112 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1114 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1115 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1116 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1117 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1121 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1122 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1123 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1124 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1126 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1127 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1128 time zone is indeterminate.
1130 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1131 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1132 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1133 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1135 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1136 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1137 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1139 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1140 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1142 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1143 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1144 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1148 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1149 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1150 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1153 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1157 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1158 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1161 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1162 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1165 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1166 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1167 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1168 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1169 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1171 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1172 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1173 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1175 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1178 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1179 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1180 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1182 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1183 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1184 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1186 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1187 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1189 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1190 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1191 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1193 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1194 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1196 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1197 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1198 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1200 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1202 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1203 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1205 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1206 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1208 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1209 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1211 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1212 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1214 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1215 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1216 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1217 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1219 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1220 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1221 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1223 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1224 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1225 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1227 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1228 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1229 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1231 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1232 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1233 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1235 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1236 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1238 ** Changes in behavior
1240 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1242 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1243 values for any argument.
1245 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1246 they are out of localtime range.
1248 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1249 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1250 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1251 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1255 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1256 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1257 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1259 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1260 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1262 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1263 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1265 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1267 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1268 written to a terminal.
1270 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1271 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1273 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1274 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1275 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1276 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1277 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1278 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1279 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1280 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1281 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1282 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1283 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1285 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1286 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1290 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1291 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1295 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1297 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1298 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1300 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1303 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1307 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1308 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1309 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1310 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1312 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1313 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1315 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1316 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1317 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1319 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1320 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1322 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1323 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1324 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1326 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1327 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1329 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1330 that specify an offset for the first field.
1331 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1333 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1334 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1338 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1339 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1343 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1344 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1346 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1347 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1348 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1349 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1350 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1352 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1353 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1354 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1356 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1357 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1358 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1360 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1361 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1363 ** Changes in behavior
1365 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1366 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1368 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1369 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1371 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1372 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1374 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1375 when outputting to a terminal.
1377 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1381 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1382 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1384 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1385 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1387 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1388 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1389 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1391 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1392 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1394 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1395 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1396 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1398 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1400 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1401 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1402 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1404 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1405 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1408 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1412 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1413 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1415 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1416 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1418 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1419 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1420 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1422 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1423 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1424 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1425 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1427 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1428 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1429 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1430 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1432 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1433 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1435 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1436 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1438 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1439 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1440 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1442 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1443 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1444 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1446 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1447 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1448 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1450 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1451 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1452 character at the 4GiB position.
1453 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1455 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1456 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1458 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1459 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1461 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1462 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1463 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1465 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1466 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1468 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1469 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1470 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1472 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1473 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1475 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1476 when those files are being created or renamed.
1477 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1481 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1482 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1483 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1484 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1486 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1487 on stderr approximately every second.
1489 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1490 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1492 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1493 other than the default newline character.
1495 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1496 a useful setting with high latency links.
1498 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1499 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1501 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1502 and output errors in general.
1504 ** Changes in behavior
1506 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1507 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1508 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1509 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1511 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1512 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1513 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1514 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1515 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1517 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1518 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1520 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1522 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1523 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1525 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1526 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1530 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1531 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1533 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1534 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1536 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1537 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1539 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1540 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1542 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1544 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1545 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1546 documentation are provided.
1549 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1553 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1554 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1556 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1557 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1558 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1559 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1561 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1562 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1563 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1564 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1566 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1567 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1569 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1570 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1572 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1573 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1574 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1575 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1576 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1577 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1578 values are in octal.
1591 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1593 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1594 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1595 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1596 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1597 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1598 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1600 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1601 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1602 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1603 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1605 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1606 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1607 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1609 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1610 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1611 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1612 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1614 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1615 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1616 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1618 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1619 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1620 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1622 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1623 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1624 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1625 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1626 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1628 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1629 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1630 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1632 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1633 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1635 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1636 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1637 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1639 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1640 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1642 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1643 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1645 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1646 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1648 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1649 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1651 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1652 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1653 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1655 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1656 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1660 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1661 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1663 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1664 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1665 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1666 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1667 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1668 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1669 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1670 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1671 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1672 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1673 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1674 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1675 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1676 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1677 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1678 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1679 it suitable for embedded system.
1681 ** Changes in behavior
1683 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1684 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1686 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1687 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1689 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1690 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1691 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1693 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1694 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1695 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1699 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1700 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1701 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1703 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1705 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1706 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1707 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1709 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1710 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1711 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1712 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1714 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1715 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1717 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1718 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1719 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1722 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1726 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1727 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1728 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1730 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1731 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1732 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1733 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1735 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1736 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1737 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1739 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1740 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1742 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1744 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1745 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1746 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1748 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1749 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1750 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1752 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1753 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1754 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1755 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1757 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1758 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1759 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1761 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1762 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1763 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1765 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1766 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1768 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1769 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1770 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1771 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1773 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1774 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1775 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1777 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1778 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1779 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1783 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1784 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1785 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1787 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1788 used to identify the split points.
1790 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1791 command line argument through to the output.
1793 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1796 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1797 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1799 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1800 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1802 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1804 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1805 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1806 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1808 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1809 unique groups with empty lines.
1811 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1812 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1814 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1817 ** Changes in behavior
1819 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1820 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1821 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1822 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1824 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1825 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1827 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1828 not just the transfer counts.
1830 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1832 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1833 as per the documented interface.
1837 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1839 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1840 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1841 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1842 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1844 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1845 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1846 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1847 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1849 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1850 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1851 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1853 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1854 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1856 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1857 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1859 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1863 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1866 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1870 numfmt: reformat numbers
1874 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1875 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1876 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1878 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1879 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1880 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1882 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1883 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1887 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1888 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1890 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1891 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1892 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1894 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1895 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1896 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1898 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1899 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1900 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1902 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1903 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1904 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1906 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1907 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1908 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1910 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1911 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1913 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1914 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1916 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1917 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1918 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1920 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1921 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1922 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1924 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1925 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1926 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1928 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1929 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1930 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1931 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1933 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1934 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1935 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1937 ** Changes in behavior
1939 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1940 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1941 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1942 'total' in the target column.
1944 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1945 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1946 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1948 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1949 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1951 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1952 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1956 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1957 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1959 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1960 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1962 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1966 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1967 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1968 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1969 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1970 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1971 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1972 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1973 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1974 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1975 for a patched distribution package.
1977 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1978 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1980 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1981 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1982 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1983 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1986 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1990 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1992 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1993 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1994 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1998 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1999 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2000 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2001 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2002 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2004 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2005 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2007 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2008 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2009 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2010 eventually exits nonzero.
2012 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2013 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2014 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2015 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2016 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2018 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2019 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2020 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2022 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2023 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2024 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2026 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2027 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2028 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2030 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2031 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2032 Before, this would infloop:
2033 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2034 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2036 ** Changes in behavior
2038 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2042 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2043 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2044 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2045 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2046 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2049 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2050 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2051 format-changing options.
2053 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2054 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2055 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2056 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2057 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2061 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2062 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2063 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2064 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2065 are run without following the instructions in README.
2067 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2068 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2069 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2070 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2071 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2072 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2073 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2076 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2080 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2081 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2082 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2083 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2085 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2086 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2087 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2088 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2090 sort -u could read freed memory.
2091 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2092 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2093 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2097 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2098 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2099 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2100 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2103 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2107 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2108 processes will not intersperse their output.
2109 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2111 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2112 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2113 date: invalid date '\260'
2114 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2116 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2117 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2118 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2119 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2121 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2122 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2123 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2125 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2126 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2127 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2128 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2129 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2130 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2132 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2133 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2135 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2136 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2138 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2139 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2140 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2142 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2143 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2144 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2148 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2150 ** Changes in behavior
2152 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2153 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2154 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2155 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2156 have any reason to include it here.
2160 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2161 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2162 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2164 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2165 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2166 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2169 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2173 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2174 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2175 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2176 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2177 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2178 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2180 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2181 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2182 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2183 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2184 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2185 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2186 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2188 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2189 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2191 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2192 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2196 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2197 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2199 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2201 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2203 ** Changes in behavior
2205 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2206 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2207 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2209 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2210 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2213 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2217 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2218 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2219 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2220 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2221 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2222 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2223 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2224 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2226 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2227 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2228 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2229 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2230 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2232 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2233 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2235 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2236 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2238 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2239 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2241 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2242 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2244 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2245 additional static suffix to output file names.
2247 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2248 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2249 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2251 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2252 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2256 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2257 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2258 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2260 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2261 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2262 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2263 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2264 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2265 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2267 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2268 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2269 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2270 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2271 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2273 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2274 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2275 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2276 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2280 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2281 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2282 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2284 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2285 instead of causing a usage failure.
2287 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2290 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2294 realpath: print resolved file names.
2298 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2299 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2301 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2302 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2304 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2305 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2306 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2307 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2308 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2309 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2311 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2312 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2313 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2315 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2316 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2317 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2319 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2320 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2321 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2322 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2323 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2325 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2327 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2328 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2330 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2331 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2332 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2334 ** Changes in behavior
2336 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2337 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2338 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2339 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2340 usually-short referent instead.
2342 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2343 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2344 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2345 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2348 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2352 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2353 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2354 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2356 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2357 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2359 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2364 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2365 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2367 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2368 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2369 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2370 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2372 ** Changes in behavior
2374 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2375 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2376 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2380 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2381 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2382 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2385 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2389 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2390 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2391 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2393 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2394 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2396 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2397 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2398 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2399 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2400 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2402 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2403 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2404 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2405 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2406 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2407 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2408 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2409 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2411 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2412 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2414 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2415 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2417 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2418 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2420 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2421 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2422 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2424 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2425 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2426 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2427 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2429 ** Changes in behavior
2431 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2432 when -v or -c specified.
2434 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2435 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2439 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2440 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2441 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2442 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2443 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2445 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2446 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2447 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2449 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2450 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2451 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2452 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2453 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2454 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2455 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2457 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2458 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2459 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2463 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2464 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2466 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2469 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2470 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2472 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2473 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2475 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2476 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2478 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2480 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2484 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2485 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2487 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2490 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2494 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2495 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2497 ** Changes in behavior
2499 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2500 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2501 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2502 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2503 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2504 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2505 resolved for 2.6.39.
2506 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2507 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2508 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2512 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2515 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2519 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2520 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2521 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2523 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2524 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2525 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2527 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2528 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2529 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2531 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2532 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2534 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2535 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2537 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2538 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2540 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2541 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2545 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2546 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2547 processed portion thereof.
2549 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2550 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2552 ** Changes in behavior
2554 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2555 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2556 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2558 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2559 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2560 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2562 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2563 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2565 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2566 Use --preserve-context instead.
2568 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2571 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2575 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2576 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2577 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2578 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2579 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2581 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2582 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2584 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2585 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2586 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2588 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2589 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2591 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2592 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2596 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2597 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2598 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2599 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2600 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2601 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2602 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2603 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2605 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2606 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2607 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2609 ** Changes in behavior
2611 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2612 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2613 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2616 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2620 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2621 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2622 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2625 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2629 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2630 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2632 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2633 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2635 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2636 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2638 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2639 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2640 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2641 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2643 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2644 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2646 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2647 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2648 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2650 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2652 ** Changes in behavior
2654 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2655 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2656 to the number of available processors.
2660 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2661 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2662 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2665 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2669 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2670 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2671 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2672 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2674 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2675 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2676 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2678 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2679 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2681 ** Changes in behavior
2683 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2684 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2686 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2687 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2688 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2689 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2690 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2691 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2693 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2694 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2695 the same way as the others.
2697 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2698 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2701 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2705 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2706 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2707 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2709 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2710 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2712 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2713 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2714 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2716 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2717 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2719 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2720 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2722 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2723 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2724 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2726 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2727 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2728 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2729 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2733 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2734 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2736 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2739 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2740 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2742 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2744 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2745 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2746 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2748 ** Changes in behavior
2750 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2751 rather than its aliased target.
2753 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2754 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2755 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2757 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2758 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2759 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2760 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2761 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2762 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2763 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2764 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2766 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2768 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2770 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2771 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2774 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2775 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2776 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2777 control like taskset for example.
2779 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2781 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2782 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2783 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2784 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2785 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2786 includes %C when context information is available.
2788 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2789 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2790 rather than a file system attribute.
2792 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2793 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2794 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2795 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2797 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2798 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2799 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2801 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2802 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2803 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2806 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2810 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2811 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2813 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2815 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2816 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2818 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2819 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2820 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2821 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2823 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2824 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2825 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2829 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2830 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2832 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2833 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2834 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2836 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2837 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2838 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2839 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2840 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2841 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2842 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2843 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2844 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2846 ** Changes in behavior
2848 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2849 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2851 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2852 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2855 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2859 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2860 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2861 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2862 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2866 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2867 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2869 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2870 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2871 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2872 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2874 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2875 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2876 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2879 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2883 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2884 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2885 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2887 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2888 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2889 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2891 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2892 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2894 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2895 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2896 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2897 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2899 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2900 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2901 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2903 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2904 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2905 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2906 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2908 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2909 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2910 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2912 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2913 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2914 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2915 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2917 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2918 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2919 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2921 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2922 processes will not intersperse their output.
2923 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2926 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2930 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2931 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2933 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2934 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2936 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2937 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2938 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2939 the presence of the empty string argument.
2940 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2942 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2943 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2944 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2945 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2947 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2948 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2950 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2951 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2952 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2954 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2955 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2956 and with a malicious user on the same system
2957 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2958 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2961 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2965 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2966 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2967 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2969 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2970 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2971 offending directory and all "contents."
2973 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2974 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2975 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2977 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2978 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2979 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2981 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2982 processes will not intersperse their output.
2983 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2984 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2986 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2987 output the name of the file to stdout.
2988 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2990 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2991 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2992 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2994 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2995 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2998 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2999 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3000 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3002 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3003 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3004 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3005 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3006 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3007 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3009 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3010 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3011 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3012 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3014 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3015 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3017 ** Changes in behavior
3019 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3020 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3021 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3022 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3023 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3025 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3026 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3027 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3028 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3030 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3032 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3033 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3034 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3035 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3036 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3040 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3044 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3045 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3047 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3048 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3050 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3051 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3052 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3054 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3055 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3058 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3062 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3063 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3064 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3066 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3067 to accommodate leap seconds.
3068 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3070 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3071 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3072 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3074 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3076 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3077 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3078 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3080 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3081 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3082 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3083 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3084 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3088 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3089 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3090 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3091 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3093 ** Changes in behavior
3095 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3096 environment variable is set.
3098 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3099 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3100 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3104 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3105 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3106 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3107 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3109 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3110 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3111 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3112 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3116 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3117 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3118 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3120 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3121 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3122 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3123 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3124 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3125 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3126 another improvement:
3128 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
3129 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3132 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3136 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3137 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3138 and libraries tested at configure time.
3139 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3141 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3142 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3144 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3145 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3147 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3148 printing a summary to stderr.
3149 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3151 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3152 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3153 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3155 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3156 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3158 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3159 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3160 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3161 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3163 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3164 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3165 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3166 which is relatively unusual.
3167 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3169 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3170 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3171 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3172 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3173 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3174 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3175 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3179 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3180 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3181 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3182 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3183 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3187 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3188 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3190 ** Changes in behavior
3192 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3193 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3194 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3195 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3196 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3199 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3203 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3204 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3206 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3207 before data copying has started.
3209 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3210 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3212 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3213 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3214 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3215 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3217 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3218 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3219 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3220 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3222 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3227 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3228 for its standard streams.
3230 ** Changes in behavior
3232 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3233 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3234 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3235 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3236 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3237 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3239 ** Deprecated options
3241 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3242 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3246 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3248 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3249 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3250 a btrfs file system.
3252 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3254 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3255 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3257 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3258 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3261 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3265 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3266 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3267 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3268 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3270 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3271 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3272 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3273 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3274 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3279 make check: two tests have been corrected
3283 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3284 inherited from gnulib.
3287 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3291 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3292 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3293 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3294 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3296 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3297 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3299 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3301 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3302 systems without xattr support.
3304 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3305 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3306 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3308 ** Changes in behavior
3310 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3311 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3312 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3313 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3315 ** Improved robustness
3317 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3318 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3319 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3320 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3321 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3322 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3323 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3324 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3325 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3329 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3330 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3332 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3333 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3334 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3335 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3336 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3339 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3343 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3344 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3345 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3349 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3350 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3351 data was read, or on process exit.
3352 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3354 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3355 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3356 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3357 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3359 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3360 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3361 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3362 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3364 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3365 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3367 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3368 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3370 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3371 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3372 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3374 ** Changes in behavior
3376 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3377 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3378 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3380 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3381 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3383 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3384 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3385 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3388 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3392 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3394 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3395 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3396 install: Never copies xattrs
3398 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3399 from overwriting any existing destination file
3401 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3402 mode where this feature is available.
3404 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3405 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3406 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3407 do not modify the destination at all.
3409 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3411 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3415 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3416 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3418 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3420 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3421 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3423 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3424 processing the first file name
3426 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3427 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3428 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3429 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3431 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3432 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3434 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3435 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3438 ** Changes in behavior
3440 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3441 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3443 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3444 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3445 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3447 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3448 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3450 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3452 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3453 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3454 is still marked with a '+'.
3457 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3461 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3462 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3466 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3467 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3468 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3469 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3470 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3471 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3473 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3474 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3476 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3477 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3479 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3481 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3482 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3483 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3485 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3486 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3488 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3489 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3490 used to factor large numbers.
3492 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3495 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3497 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3499 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3500 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3502 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3503 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3504 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3505 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3507 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3508 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3509 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3511 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3512 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3516 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3518 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3519 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3521 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3522 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3524 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3526 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3527 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3531 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3532 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3533 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3535 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3537 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3538 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3539 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3541 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3542 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3543 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3545 ** Changes in behavior
3547 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3548 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3551 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3555 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3556 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3557 'futimens' system calls.
3561 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3563 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3564 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3565 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3567 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3568 with no USERNAME argument.
3570 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3571 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3572 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3574 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3575 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3576 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3577 number of fields for some inputs.
3579 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3580 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3582 ** Changes in behavior
3584 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3585 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3588 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3592 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3594 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3595 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3596 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3597 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3599 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3600 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3602 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3603 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3605 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3606 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3608 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3609 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3610 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3611 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3613 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3614 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3615 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3616 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3617 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3618 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3620 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3621 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3623 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3624 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3625 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3627 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3628 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3630 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3631 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3633 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3634 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3635 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3636 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3638 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3639 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3641 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3642 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3644 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3645 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3646 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3650 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3651 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3653 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3654 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3655 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3656 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3660 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3661 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3663 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3665 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3669 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3670 which have negative errno values.
3674 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3678 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3682 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3683 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3686 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3690 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3691 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3692 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3694 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3695 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3696 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3697 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3701 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3702 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3703 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3704 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3707 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3711 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3713 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3714 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3715 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3718 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3722 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3723 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3725 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3727 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3729 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3731 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3735 ** Changes in behavior
3737 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3738 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3740 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3741 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3743 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3744 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3745 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3749 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3750 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3751 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3752 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3753 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3754 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3755 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3756 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3757 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3758 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3759 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3761 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3762 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3763 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3766 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3769 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3770 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3771 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3773 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3774 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3775 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3778 ** New build options
3780 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3781 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3782 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3783 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3785 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3786 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3787 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3788 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3789 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3790 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3791 of "make check" fail.
3793 ** Remove deprecated options
3795 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3796 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3797 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3798 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3799 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3801 ** Improved robustness
3803 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3804 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3805 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3806 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3807 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3808 loss of the contents of a/f.
3810 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3811 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3815 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3816 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3817 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3819 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3820 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3821 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3822 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3824 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3825 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3826 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3827 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3828 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3829 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3830 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3831 destination is a symlink.
3833 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3835 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3836 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3838 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3839 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3841 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3843 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3844 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3846 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3847 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3849 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3852 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3853 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3855 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3856 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3858 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3859 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3860 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3861 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3863 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3864 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3865 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3867 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3868 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3869 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3871 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3872 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3873 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3874 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3876 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3877 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3878 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3880 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3881 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3883 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3884 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3886 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3888 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3889 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3890 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3892 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3893 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3895 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3896 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3898 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3899 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3901 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3902 [present in the original version]
3905 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3909 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3911 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3912 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3913 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3915 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3916 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3918 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3922 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3923 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3925 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3926 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3928 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3929 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3931 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3932 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3933 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3934 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3935 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3936 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3938 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3939 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3942 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3943 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3945 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3948 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3949 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3950 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3952 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3953 directory is unreadable.
3955 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3956 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3957 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3959 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3960 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3961 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3962 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3963 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3966 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3967 Before it would print nothing.
3969 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3971 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3972 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3973 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3974 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3975 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3976 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3977 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3978 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3980 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3984 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3985 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3986 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3988 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3989 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3990 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3991 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3994 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3998 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3999 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4000 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4001 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4002 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4003 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4004 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4006 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4007 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4008 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4009 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4010 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4011 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4012 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4013 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4015 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4016 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4017 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4020 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4024 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4025 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4027 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4028 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4029 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4031 ** Improved robustness
4033 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4034 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4035 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4038 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4042 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4043 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4044 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4045 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4046 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4048 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4052 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4055 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4059 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4060 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4061 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4062 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4064 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4065 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4067 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4068 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4069 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4072 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4074 ** Improved robustness
4076 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4077 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4079 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4080 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4081 or NFS-mounted partition.
4083 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4084 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4088 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4089 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4090 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4091 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4092 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4093 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4095 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4096 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4098 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4099 or neglect to report file removal.
4101 For the "groups" command:
4103 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4104 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4106 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4108 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4110 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4114 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4115 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4118 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4120 ** Changes in behavior
4122 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4123 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4124 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4125 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4127 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4128 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4129 a final './' or '../' component.
4131 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4132 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4133 this only for pipes.
4135 ** Infrastructure changes
4137 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4138 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4139 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4140 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4144 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4145 name is "." or "..".
4147 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4148 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4149 dirent.d_type support.
4151 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4152 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4154 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4155 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4156 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4157 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4160 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4162 ** Changes in behavior
4164 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4168 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4169 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4173 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4174 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4175 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4177 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4178 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4180 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4181 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4183 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4185 ** Improved robustness
4187 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4188 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4189 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4191 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4192 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4195 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4196 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4198 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4199 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4201 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4202 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4204 ** Changes in behavior
4206 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4207 where the two are distinct.
4209 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4210 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4211 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4212 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4213 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4214 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4215 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4216 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4217 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4218 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4219 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4220 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4221 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4222 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4223 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4224 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4225 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4227 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4228 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4229 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4231 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4232 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4233 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4234 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4237 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4238 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4242 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4243 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4244 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4245 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4247 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4248 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4249 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4251 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4252 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4253 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4254 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4255 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4258 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4259 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4261 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4262 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4263 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4264 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4266 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4267 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4268 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4270 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4271 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4272 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4273 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4275 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4276 and sticky) with the -m option.
4278 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4279 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4280 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4281 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4282 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4284 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4285 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4287 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4291 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4292 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4293 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4294 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4296 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4298 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4300 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4301 silently ignoring one of them.
4303 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4304 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4305 containing this change was 5.92.
4307 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4308 automatically newline terminated.
4310 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4311 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4312 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4313 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4316 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4317 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4318 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4321 ** Scheduled for removal
4323 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4324 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4326 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4327 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4328 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4329 command to unlink a directory.
4331 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4332 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4333 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4334 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4338 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4339 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4340 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4341 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4342 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4343 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4347 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4348 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4350 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4352 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4353 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4354 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4356 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4357 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4360 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4361 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4363 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4364 list directories before files.
4366 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4367 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4368 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4369 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4372 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4374 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4376 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4377 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4378 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4380 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4381 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4385 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4386 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4387 usually printing nothing.
4389 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4391 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4392 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4393 them with hard-linked directories.
4395 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4396 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4397 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4399 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4400 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4401 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4403 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4406 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4407 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4409 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4410 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4412 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4413 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4415 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4416 all command-line arguments.
4418 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4420 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4422 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4423 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4425 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4427 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4428 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4429 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4430 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4431 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4433 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4434 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4436 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4437 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4438 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4439 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4441 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4443 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4447 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4448 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4450 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4451 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4453 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4454 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4456 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4457 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4459 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4460 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4462 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4464 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4465 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4466 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4469 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4471 ** Build-related bug fixes
4473 installing .mo files would fail
4476 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4480 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4482 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4485 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4489 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4490 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4494 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4496 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4497 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4499 ** Deprecated options
4501 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4502 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4504 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4508 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4510 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4511 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4512 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4513 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4515 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4518 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4524 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4529 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4531 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4533 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4534 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4535 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4537 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4538 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4539 problematic usages. These include:
4541 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4542 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4543 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4544 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4545 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4546 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4547 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4548 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4549 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4551 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4552 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4554 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4555 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4556 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4557 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4559 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4560 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4561 between binary and text files.
4563 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4567 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4571 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4572 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4574 head tac tail tee tr
4575 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4577 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4578 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4580 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4581 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4582 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4584 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4586 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4588 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4589 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4590 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4594 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4596 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4597 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4599 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4600 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4601 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4605 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4606 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4610 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4611 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4612 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4616 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4617 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4621 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4623 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4625 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4629 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4630 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4631 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4633 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4634 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4635 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4636 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4637 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4639 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4643 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4644 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4645 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4647 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4649 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4650 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4651 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4652 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4654 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4656 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4657 rather than silently wrapping around.
4659 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4660 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4662 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4663 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4665 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4666 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4667 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4668 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4670 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4672 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4674 ** Improved robustness
4676 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4677 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4678 no matter how large the result.
4680 ** Improved portability
4682 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4683 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4685 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4687 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4688 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4689 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4691 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4692 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4696 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4697 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4699 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4701 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4702 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4703 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4704 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4706 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4707 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4709 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4710 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4711 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4713 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4715 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4716 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4718 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4719 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4721 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4723 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4724 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4726 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4727 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4729 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4730 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4731 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4733 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4735 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4737 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4741 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4743 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4744 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4745 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4747 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4748 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4750 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4751 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4752 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4754 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4755 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4757 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4758 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4759 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4760 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4762 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4763 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4765 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4766 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4767 the file system does not support it.
4769 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4771 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4772 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4774 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4776 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4777 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4779 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4780 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4781 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4782 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4784 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4785 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4788 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4789 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4790 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4791 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4793 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4794 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4795 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4796 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4798 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4799 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4801 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4803 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4804 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4805 reporting incorrect results.
4809 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4810 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4812 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4815 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4817 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4818 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4820 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4821 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4823 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4826 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4827 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4828 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4829 the file name does not look like a page range.
4831 printf has several changes:
4833 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4834 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4836 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4837 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4838 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4840 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4841 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4844 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4845 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4847 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4848 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4850 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4852 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4853 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4855 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4857 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4859 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4860 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4861 when first encountering the directory.
4865 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4866 output; POSIX requires this.
4868 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4869 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4871 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4873 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4874 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4876 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4877 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4879 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4880 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4881 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4882 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4883 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4884 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4885 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4887 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4888 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4889 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4891 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4892 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4894 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4896 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4898 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4899 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4900 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4901 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4903 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4907 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4908 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4909 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4910 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4911 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4913 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4914 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4915 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4917 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4918 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4920 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4921 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4923 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4924 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4925 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4926 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4927 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4929 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4930 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4932 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4933 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4935 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4937 nocreat do not create the output file
4938 excl fail if the output file already exists
4939 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4940 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4942 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4944 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4945 direct use direct I/O for data
4946 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4947 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4948 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4949 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4950 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4952 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4954 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4955 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4958 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4959 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4960 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4961 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4962 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4963 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4965 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4966 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4968 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4971 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4973 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4975 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4976 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4978 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4979 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4980 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4982 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4983 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4984 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4986 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4988 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4989 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4991 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4992 for compatibility with bash.
4994 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4996 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4997 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4998 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4999 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5001 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5002 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5004 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5005 ls supports TABSIZE.
5006 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5007 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5008 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5010 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5013 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5015 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5016 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5017 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5018 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5019 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5020 an offset, not as a file name.
5022 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5023 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5025 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5026 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5028 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5029 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5031 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5032 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5033 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5035 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5036 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5038 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5039 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5043 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5045 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5047 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5051 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5052 or more arguments between partitions.
5054 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5055 holes in the destination.
5057 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5058 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5059 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5060 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5061 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5062 terminates immediately.
5064 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5066 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5068 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5069 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5070 not the empty string.
5072 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5073 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5077 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5078 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5079 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5082 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5089 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5093 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5094 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5096 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5097 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5099 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5100 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5101 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5104 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5108 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5109 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5111 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5112 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5114 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5115 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5116 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5118 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5120 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5123 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5125 ** Configuration option
5127 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5128 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5132 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5133 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5137 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5138 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5139 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5142 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5143 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5144 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5145 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5146 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5147 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5148 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5151 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5155 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5156 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5157 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5159 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5160 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5162 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5164 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5165 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5166 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5167 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5169 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5171 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5172 not just the ones that reference directories
5174 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5175 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5177 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5178 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5179 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5181 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5182 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5183 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5184 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5185 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5186 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5188 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5193 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5194 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5196 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5198 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5200 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5202 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5203 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5205 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5206 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5208 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5210 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5214 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5216 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5218 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5219 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5220 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5221 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5222 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5224 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5225 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5227 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5228 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5230 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5231 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5233 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5234 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5235 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5239 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5240 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5241 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5242 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5243 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5244 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5245 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5246 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5247 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5248 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5249 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5250 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5251 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5252 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5254 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5256 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5257 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5259 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5261 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5263 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5264 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5266 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5268 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5269 without a trailing newline.
5271 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5272 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5274 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5277 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5281 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5283 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5285 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5286 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5287 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5288 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5290 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5292 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5293 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5294 be printed without leading spaces.
5296 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5297 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5302 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5303 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5304 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5306 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5308 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5309 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5311 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5312 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5314 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5315 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5317 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5319 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5321 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5323 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5324 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5326 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5328 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5330 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5331 byte offsets are specified.
5334 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5337 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5340 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5341 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5342 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5343 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5344 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5345 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5346 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5347 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5348 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5349 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5350 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5351 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5352 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5353 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5354 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5355 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5356 directory where M has write access.
5357 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5358 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5359 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5362 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5363 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5364 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5365 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5366 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5367 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5368 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5369 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5370 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5371 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5372 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5373 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5374 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5375 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5376 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5377 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5378 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5379 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5380 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5381 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5382 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5383 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5384 appeared one additional time.
5386 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5387 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5388 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5389 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5392 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5393 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5394 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5395 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5396 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5397 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5398 if there were more than 338.
5400 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5401 - false --help now exits nonzero
5404 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5405 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5406 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5407 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5410 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5411 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5412 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5413 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5414 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5417 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5418 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5419 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5420 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5421 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5422 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5423 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5426 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5427 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5428 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5429 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5430 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5431 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5433 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5434 under certain unusual conditions
5435 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5436 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5439 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5440 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5441 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5442 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5443 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5444 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5445 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5446 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5447 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5448 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5449 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5450 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5451 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5452 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5453 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5454 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5457 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5458 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5461 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5462 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5463 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5464 involving hard-linked directories
5465 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5466 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5467 character-special and block files
5470 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5471 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5472 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5473 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5474 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5475 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5476 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5477 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5478 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5480 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5481 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5482 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5483 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5484 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5485 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5486 specified on the command line.
5487 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5488 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5489 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5490 the first file untouched.
5491 * readlink: new program
5492 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5493 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5494 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5495 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5496 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5497 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5500 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5501 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5502 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5503 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5504 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5505 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5506 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5507 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5508 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5509 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5510 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5511 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5513 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5514 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5515 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5517 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5518 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5519 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5520 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5521 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5522 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5523 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5524 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5527 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5528 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5531 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5532 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5533 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5534 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5535 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5536 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5537 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5540 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5541 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5543 ========================================================================
5544 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5545 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5548 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5550 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5551 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5552 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5553 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5554 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5555 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5556 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5557 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5558 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5559 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5560 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5561 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5563 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5564 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5565 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5566 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5568 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5571 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5573 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5574 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5575 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5576 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5577 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5578 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5579 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5582 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5583 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5584 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5585 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5586 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5587 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5588 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5589 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5590 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5591 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5592 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5593 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5594 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5595 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5596 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5597 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5599 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5600 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5602 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5603 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5604 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5605 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5606 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5607 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5609 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5610 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5611 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5612 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5613 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5614 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5615 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5617 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5618 the source files in the following example:
5619 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5620 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5621 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5622 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5623 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5624 links between source files with --preserve=links
5625 * cp accepts new options:
5626 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5627 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5628 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5629 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5630 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5631 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5632 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5633 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5634 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5636 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5637 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5638 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5639 even though it's older than dest.
5640 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5641 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5642 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5643 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5644 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5646 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5647 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5648 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5649 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5650 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5651 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5652 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5654 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5655 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5656 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5658 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5659 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5660 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5661 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5662 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5663 This is the default.
5665 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5666 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5667 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5668 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5669 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5671 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5674 ========================================================================
5675 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5676 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5679 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5680 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5682 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5683 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5684 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5685 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5686 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5688 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5689 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5690 that specifies a non-directory
5693 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5694 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5695 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5696 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5697 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5698 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5699 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5700 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5701 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5702 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5703 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5704 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5705 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5706 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5707 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5708 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5709 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5710 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5711 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5712 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5713 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5714 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5715 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5716 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5718 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5719 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5720 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5722 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5724 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5725 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5727 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5728 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5729 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5730 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5731 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5733 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5734 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5735 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5736 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5737 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5739 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5741 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5742 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5743 * still more portability fixes
5744 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5745 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5747 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5749 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5751 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5753 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5754 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5755 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5756 there is any time remaining
5757 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5759 ========================================================================
5760 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5761 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5763 This package began as the union of the following:
5764 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5766 ========================================================================
5768 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5770 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5771 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5772 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5773 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5774 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5775 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.