1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
8 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
9 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
11 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
12 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
15 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
16 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
17 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
19 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
20 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
23 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
24 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
25 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
27 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
28 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
29 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
30 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
31 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
33 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
34 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
35 depending on the size of the first file processed.
36 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
40 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
41 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
42 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
43 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
45 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
46 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
47 time zone is indeterminate.
49 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
50 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
51 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
52 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
54 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
55 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
57 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
58 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
59 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
62 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
66 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
67 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
70 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
71 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
72 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
74 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
75 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
76 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
77 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
78 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
80 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
81 System V style platforms where this information is available only
82 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
84 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
87 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
88 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
89 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
91 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
92 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
93 defaults to a different SELinux context.
95 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
96 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
98 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
99 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
100 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
102 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
103 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
105 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
106 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
107 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
109 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
111 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
112 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
114 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
115 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
117 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
118 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
120 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
123 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
124 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
125 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
126 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
128 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
129 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
130 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
132 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
133 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
134 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
136 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
137 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
138 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
140 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
141 only doing so if --retry is specified.
142 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
144 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
145 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
147 ** Changes in behavior
149 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
151 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
152 values for any argument.
154 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
155 they are out of localtime range.
157 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
158 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
159 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
160 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
164 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
165 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
166 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
168 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
169 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
171 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
172 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
174 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
176 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
177 written to a terminal.
179 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
180 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
182 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
183 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
184 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
185 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
186 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
187 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
188 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
189 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
190 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
191 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
192 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
194 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
195 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
199 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
200 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
204 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
206 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
207 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
209 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
212 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
216 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
217 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
218 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
219 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
221 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
222 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
224 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
225 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
228 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
231 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
232 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
233 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
235 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
236 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
238 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
239 that specify an offset for the first field.
240 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
242 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
247 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
248 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
252 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
253 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
255 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
256 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
257 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
258 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
259 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
261 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
262 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
263 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
265 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
266 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
267 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
269 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
270 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
272 ** Changes in behavior
274 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
275 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
277 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
278 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
280 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
281 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
283 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
284 when outputting to a terminal.
286 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
290 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
291 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
293 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
294 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
296 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
297 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
298 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
300 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
301 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
303 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
304 upon detection of a directory cycle.
305 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
307 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
309 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
310 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
311 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
313 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
314 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
317 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
321 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
322 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
324 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
325 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
327 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
328 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
331 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
332 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
333 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
334 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
336 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
337 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
338 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
339 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
341 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
342 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
344 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
345 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
347 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
348 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
349 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
351 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
352 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
353 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
355 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
356 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
357 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
359 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
360 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
361 character at the 4GiB position.
362 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
364 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
365 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
367 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
368 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
370 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
371 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
372 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
374 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
375 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
377 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
378 replaced before inotify watches were created.
379 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
381 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
382 [bug introduced in the beginning]
384 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
385 when those files are being created or renamed.
386 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
390 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
391 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
392 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
393 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
395 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
396 on stderr approximately every second.
398 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
399 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
401 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
402 other than the default newline character.
404 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
405 a useful setting with high latency links.
407 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
408 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
410 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
411 and output errors in general.
413 ** Changes in behavior
415 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
416 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
417 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
418 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
420 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
421 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
422 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
423 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
424 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
426 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
427 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
429 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
431 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
432 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
434 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
435 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
439 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
440 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
442 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
443 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
445 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
446 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
448 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
449 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
451 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
453 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
454 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
455 documentation are provided.
458 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
462 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
463 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
465 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
466 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
467 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
468 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
470 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
471 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
472 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
473 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
475 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
476 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
478 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
479 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
481 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
482 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
483 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
484 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
485 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
486 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
500 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
502 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
503 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
504 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
505 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
506 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
507 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
509 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
510 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
511 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
512 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
514 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
515 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
518 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
519 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
520 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
521 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
523 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
524 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
525 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
527 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
528 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
529 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
531 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
532 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
533 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
534 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
535 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
537 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
538 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
539 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
541 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
542 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
544 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
545 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
546 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
548 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
549 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
551 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
552 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
554 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
557 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
558 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
560 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
561 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
562 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
564 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
565 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
569 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
570 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
572 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
573 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
574 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
575 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
576 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
577 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
578 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
579 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
580 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
581 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
582 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
583 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
584 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
585 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
586 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
587 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
588 it suitable for embedded system.
590 ** Changes in behavior
592 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
593 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
595 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
596 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
598 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
599 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
600 will result in the delayed output of lines.
602 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
603 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
604 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
608 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
609 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
610 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
612 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
614 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
615 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
616 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
618 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
619 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
620 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
621 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
623 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
624 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
626 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
627 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
628 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
631 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
635 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
636 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
637 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
639 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
640 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
641 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
642 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
644 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
645 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
646 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
648 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
649 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
651 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
653 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
654 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
655 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
657 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
658 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
659 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
661 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
662 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
663 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
664 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
666 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
667 from the source, when copying across file systems.
668 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
670 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
671 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
672 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
674 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
675 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
677 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
678 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
679 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
680 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
682 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
683 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
684 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
686 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
687 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
688 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
692 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
693 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
694 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
696 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
697 used to identify the split points.
699 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
700 command line argument through to the output.
702 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
705 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
706 a NUL instead of a white space character.
708 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
709 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
711 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
713 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
714 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
715 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
717 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
718 unique groups with empty lines.
720 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
721 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
723 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
726 ** Changes in behavior
728 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
729 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
730 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
731 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
733 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
734 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
736 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
737 not just the transfer counts.
739 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
741 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
742 as per the documented interface.
746 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
748 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
749 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
750 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
751 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
753 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
754 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
755 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
756 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
758 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
759 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
760 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
762 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
763 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
765 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
766 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
768 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
772 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
775 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
779 numfmt: reformat numbers
783 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
784 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
785 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
787 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
788 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
789 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
791 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
792 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
796 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
797 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
799 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
800 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
801 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
803 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
804 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
805 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
807 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
808 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
809 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
811 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
812 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
813 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
815 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
816 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
817 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
819 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
820 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
822 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
823 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
825 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
826 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
827 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
829 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
830 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
831 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
833 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
834 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
835 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
837 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
838 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
839 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
840 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
842 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
843 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
844 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
846 ** Changes in behavior
848 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
849 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
850 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
851 'total' in the target column.
853 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
854 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
855 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
857 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
858 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
860 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
861 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
865 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
866 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
868 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
869 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
871 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
875 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
876 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
877 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
878 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
879 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
880 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
881 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
882 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
883 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
884 for a patched distribution package.
886 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
887 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
889 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
890 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
891 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
892 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
895 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
899 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
901 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
902 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
903 sha384sum and sha512sum.
907 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
908 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
909 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
910 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
911 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
913 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
914 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
916 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
917 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
918 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
919 eventually exits nonzero.
921 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
922 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
923 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
924 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
925 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
927 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
928 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
929 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
931 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
932 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
933 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
935 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
936 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
937 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
939 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
940 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
941 Before, this would infloop:
942 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
943 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
945 ** Changes in behavior
947 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
951 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
952 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
953 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
954 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
955 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
958 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
959 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
960 format-changing options.
962 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
963 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
964 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
965 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
966 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
970 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
971 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
972 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
973 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
974 are run without following the instructions in README.
976 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
977 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
978 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
979 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
980 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
981 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
982 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
985 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
989 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
990 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
991 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
992 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
994 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
995 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
996 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
997 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
999 sort -u could read freed memory.
1000 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1001 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1002 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1006 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1007 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1008 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1009 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1012 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1016 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1017 processes will not intersperse their output.
1018 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1020 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1021 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1022 date: invalid date '\260'
1023 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1025 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1026 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1027 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1028 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1030 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1031 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1032 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1034 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1035 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1036 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1037 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1038 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1039 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1041 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1042 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1044 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1045 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1047 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1048 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1049 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1051 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1052 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1053 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1057 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1059 ** Changes in behavior
1061 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1062 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1063 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1064 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1065 have any reason to include it here.
1069 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1070 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1071 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1073 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1074 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1075 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1078 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1082 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1083 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1084 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1085 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1086 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1087 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1089 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1090 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1091 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1092 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1093 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1094 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1095 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1097 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1100 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1101 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1105 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1106 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1108 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1110 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1112 ** Changes in behavior
1114 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1115 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1116 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1118 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1119 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1122 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1126 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1127 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1128 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1129 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1130 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1131 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1132 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1133 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1135 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1136 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1137 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1138 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1139 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1141 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1142 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1144 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1145 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1147 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1148 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1150 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1151 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1153 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1154 additional static suffix to output file names.
1156 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1157 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1158 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1160 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1161 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1165 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1166 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1167 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1169 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1170 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1171 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1172 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1173 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1174 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1176 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1177 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1178 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1179 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1180 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1182 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1183 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1184 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1185 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1189 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1190 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1191 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1193 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1194 instead of causing a usage failure.
1196 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1199 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1203 realpath: print resolved file names.
1207 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1208 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1210 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1211 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1213 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1214 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1215 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1216 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1217 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1218 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1220 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1221 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1222 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1224 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1225 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1226 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1228 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1229 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1230 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1231 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1232 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1234 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1236 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1237 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1239 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1240 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1241 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1243 ** Changes in behavior
1245 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1246 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1247 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1248 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1249 usually-short referent instead.
1251 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1252 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1253 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1254 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1257 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1261 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1262 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1263 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1265 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1268 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1269 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1273 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1274 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1276 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1277 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1278 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1279 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1281 ** Changes in behavior
1283 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1284 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1285 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1289 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1290 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1291 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1294 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1298 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1299 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1300 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1302 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1303 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1305 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1306 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1307 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1308 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1309 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1311 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1312 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1313 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1314 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1315 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1316 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1317 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1318 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1320 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1321 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1323 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1324 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1326 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1327 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1329 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1330 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1331 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1333 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1334 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1335 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1336 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1338 ** Changes in behavior
1340 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1341 when -v or -c specified.
1343 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1344 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1348 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1349 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1350 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1351 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1352 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1354 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1355 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1356 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1358 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1359 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1360 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1361 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1362 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1363 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1364 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1366 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1367 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1368 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1372 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1373 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1375 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1378 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1379 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1381 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1382 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1384 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1385 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1387 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1389 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1393 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1394 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1396 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1399 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1403 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1404 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1406 ** Changes in behavior
1408 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1409 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1410 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1411 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1412 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1413 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1414 resolved for 2.6.39.
1415 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1416 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1417 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1421 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1424 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1428 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1429 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1430 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1432 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1433 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1434 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1436 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1437 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1438 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1440 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1441 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1443 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1444 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1446 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1447 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1449 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1450 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1454 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1455 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1456 processed portion thereof.
1458 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1459 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1461 ** Changes in behavior
1463 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1464 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1465 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1467 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1468 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1469 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1471 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1472 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1474 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1475 Use --preserve-context instead.
1477 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1480 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1484 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1485 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1486 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1487 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1488 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1490 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1491 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1493 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1494 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1495 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1497 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1498 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1500 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1501 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1505 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1506 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1507 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1508 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1509 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1510 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1511 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1512 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1514 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1515 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1516 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1518 ** Changes in behavior
1520 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1521 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1522 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1525 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1529 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1530 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1531 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1534 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1538 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1539 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1541 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1542 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1544 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1545 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1547 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1548 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1549 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1550 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1552 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1553 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1555 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1556 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1557 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1559 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1561 ** Changes in behavior
1563 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1564 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1565 to the number of available processors.
1569 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1572 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1576 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1577 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1578 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1579 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1581 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1582 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1583 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1585 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1586 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1588 ** Changes in behavior
1590 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1591 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1593 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1594 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1595 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1596 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1597 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1598 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1600 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1601 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1602 the same way as the others.
1604 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1605 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1608 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1612 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1613 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1614 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1616 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1617 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1619 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1620 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1621 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1623 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1624 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1626 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1627 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1629 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1630 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1631 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1633 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1634 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1635 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1636 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1640 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1641 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1643 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1646 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1647 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1649 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1651 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1652 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1653 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1655 ** Changes in behavior
1657 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1658 rather than its aliased target.
1660 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1661 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1662 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1664 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1665 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1666 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1667 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1668 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1669 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1670 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1671 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1673 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1675 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1677 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1678 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1681 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1682 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1683 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1684 control like taskset for example.
1686 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1688 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1689 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1690 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1691 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1692 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1693 includes %C when context information is available.
1695 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1696 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1697 rather than a file system attribute.
1699 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1700 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1701 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1702 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1704 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1705 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1706 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1708 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1709 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1710 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1713 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1717 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1718 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1720 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1722 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1723 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1725 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1726 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1727 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1728 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1730 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1731 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1732 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1736 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1737 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1739 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1740 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1741 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1743 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1744 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1745 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1746 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1747 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1748 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1749 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1750 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1751 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1753 ** Changes in behavior
1755 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1756 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1758 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1759 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1762 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1766 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1767 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1768 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1769 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1773 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1774 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1776 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1777 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1778 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1779 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1781 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1782 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1783 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1786 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1790 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1791 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1792 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1794 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1795 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1796 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1798 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1799 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1801 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1802 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1803 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1804 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1806 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1807 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1808 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1810 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1811 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1812 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1813 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1815 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1816 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1817 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1819 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1820 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1821 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1822 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1824 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1825 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1826 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1828 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1829 processes will not intersperse their output.
1830 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1833 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1837 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1838 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1840 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1841 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1843 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1844 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1845 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1846 the presence of the empty string argument.
1847 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1849 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1850 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1851 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1852 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1854 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1855 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1857 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1858 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1859 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1861 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1862 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1863 and with a malicious user on the same system
1864 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1865 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1868 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1872 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1873 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1874 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1876 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1877 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1878 offending directory and all "contents."
1880 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1881 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1882 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1884 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1885 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1886 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1888 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1889 processes will not intersperse their output.
1890 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1891 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1893 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1894 output the name of the file to stdout.
1895 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1897 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1898 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1899 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1901 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1902 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1905 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1906 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1907 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1909 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1910 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1911 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1912 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1913 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1914 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1916 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1917 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1918 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1919 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1921 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1922 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1924 ** Changes in behavior
1926 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1927 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1928 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1929 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1930 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1932 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1933 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1934 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1935 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1937 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1939 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1940 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1941 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1942 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1943 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1947 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1951 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1952 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1954 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1955 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1957 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1958 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1959 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1961 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1962 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1965 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1969 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1970 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1971 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1973 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1974 to accommodate leap seconds.
1975 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1977 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1978 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1979 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1981 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1983 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1984 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1985 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1987 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1988 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1989 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1990 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1991 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1995 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1996 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1997 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1998 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2000 ** Changes in behavior
2002 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2003 environment variable is set.
2005 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2006 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2007 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2011 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2012 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2013 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2014 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2016 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2017 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2018 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2019 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2023 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2024 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2025 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2027 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2028 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2029 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2030 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2031 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2032 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2033 another improvement:
2035 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2036 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2039 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2043 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2044 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2045 and libraries tested at configure time.
2046 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2048 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2049 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2051 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2052 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2054 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2055 printing a summary to stderr.
2056 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2058 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2059 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2060 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2062 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2063 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2065 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2066 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2067 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2068 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2070 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2071 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2072 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2073 which is relatively unusual.
2074 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2076 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2077 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2078 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2079 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2080 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2081 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2082 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2086 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2087 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2088 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2089 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2090 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2094 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2095 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2097 ** Changes in behavior
2099 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2100 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2101 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2102 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2103 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2106 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2110 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2111 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2113 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2114 before data copying has started.
2116 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2117 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2119 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2120 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2121 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2122 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2124 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2125 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2126 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2127 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2129 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2134 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2135 for its standard streams.
2137 ** Changes in behavior
2139 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2140 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2141 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2142 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2143 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2144 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2146 ** Deprecated options
2148 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2149 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2153 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2155 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2156 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2157 a btrfs file system.
2159 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2161 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2162 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2164 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2165 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2168 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2172 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2173 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2174 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2175 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2177 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2178 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2179 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2180 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2181 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2186 make check: two tests have been corrected
2190 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2191 inherited from gnulib.
2194 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2198 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2199 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2200 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2201 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2203 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2204 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2206 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2208 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2209 systems without xattr support.
2211 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2212 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2213 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2215 ** Changes in behavior
2217 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2218 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2219 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2220 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2222 ** Improved robustness
2224 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2225 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2226 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2227 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2228 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2229 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2230 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2231 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2232 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2236 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2237 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2239 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2240 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2241 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2242 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2243 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2246 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2250 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2251 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2252 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2256 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2257 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2258 data was read, or on process exit.
2259 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2261 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2262 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2263 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2264 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2266 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2267 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2268 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2269 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2271 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2272 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2274 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2275 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2277 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2278 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2279 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2281 ** Changes in behavior
2283 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2284 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2285 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2287 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2288 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2290 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2291 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2292 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2295 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2299 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2301 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2302 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2303 install: Never copies xattrs
2305 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2306 from overwriting any existing destination file
2308 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2309 mode where this feature is available.
2311 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2312 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2313 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2314 do not modify the destination at all.
2316 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2318 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2322 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2323 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2325 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2327 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2328 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2330 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2331 processing the first file name
2333 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2334 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2335 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2336 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2338 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2339 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2341 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2342 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2345 ** Changes in behavior
2347 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2348 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2350 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2351 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2352 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2354 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2355 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2357 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2359 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2360 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2361 is still marked with a '+'.
2364 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2368 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2369 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2373 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2374 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2375 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2376 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2377 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2378 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2380 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2381 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2383 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2384 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2386 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2388 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2389 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2390 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2392 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2393 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2395 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2396 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2397 used to factor large numbers.
2399 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2402 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2404 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2406 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2407 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2409 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2410 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2411 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2412 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2414 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2415 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2416 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2418 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2419 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2423 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2425 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2426 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2428 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2429 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2431 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2433 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2434 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2438 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2439 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2440 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2442 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2444 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2445 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2446 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2448 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2449 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2450 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2452 ** Changes in behavior
2454 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2455 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2458 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2462 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2463 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2464 'futimens' system calls.
2468 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2470 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2471 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2472 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2474 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2475 with no USERNAME argument.
2477 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2478 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2479 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2481 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2482 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2483 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2484 number of fields for some inputs.
2486 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2487 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2489 ** Changes in behavior
2491 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2492 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2495 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2499 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2501 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2502 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2503 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2504 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2506 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2507 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2509 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2510 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2512 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2513 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2515 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2516 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2517 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2518 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2520 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2521 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2522 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2523 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2524 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2525 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2527 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2528 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2530 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2531 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2532 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2534 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2535 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2537 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2538 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2540 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2541 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2542 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2543 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2545 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2546 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2548 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2549 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2551 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2552 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2553 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2557 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2558 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2560 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2561 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2562 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2563 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2567 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2568 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2570 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2572 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2576 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2577 which have negative errno values.
2581 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2585 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2589 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2590 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2593 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2597 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2598 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2599 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2601 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2602 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2603 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2604 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2608 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2609 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2610 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2611 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2614 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2618 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2620 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2621 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2622 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2625 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2629 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2630 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2632 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2634 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2636 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2638 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2642 ** Changes in behavior
2644 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2645 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2647 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2648 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2650 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2651 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2652 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2656 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2657 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2658 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2659 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2660 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2661 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2662 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2663 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2664 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2665 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2666 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2668 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2669 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2670 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2673 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2676 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2677 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2678 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2680 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2681 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2682 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2685 ** New build options
2687 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2688 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2689 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2690 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2692 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2693 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2694 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2695 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2696 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2697 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2698 of "make check" fail.
2700 ** Remove deprecated options
2702 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2703 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2704 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2705 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2706 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2708 ** Improved robustness
2710 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2711 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2712 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2713 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2714 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2715 loss of the contents of a/f.
2717 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2718 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2722 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2723 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2724 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2726 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2727 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2728 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2729 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2731 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2732 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2733 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2734 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2735 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2736 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2737 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2738 destination is a symlink.
2740 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2742 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2743 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2745 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2746 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2748 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2750 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2751 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2753 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2754 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2756 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2759 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2760 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2762 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2763 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2765 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2766 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2767 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2768 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2770 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2771 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2772 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2774 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2775 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2776 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2778 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2779 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2780 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2781 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2783 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2784 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2785 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2787 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2788 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2790 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2791 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2793 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2795 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2796 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2797 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2799 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2800 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2802 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2803 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2805 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2806 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2808 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2809 [present in the original version]
2812 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2816 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2818 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2819 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2820 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2822 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2823 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2825 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2829 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2830 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2832 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2833 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2835 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2836 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2838 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2839 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2840 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2841 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2842 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2843 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2845 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2846 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2849 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2850 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2852 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2855 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2856 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2857 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2859 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2860 directory is unreadable.
2862 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2863 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2864 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2866 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2867 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2868 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2869 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2870 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2873 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2874 Before it would print nothing.
2876 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2878 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2879 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2880 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2881 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2882 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2883 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2884 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2885 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2887 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2891 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2892 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2893 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2895 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2896 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2897 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2898 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2901 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2905 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2906 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2907 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2908 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2909 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2910 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2911 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2913 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2914 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2915 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2916 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2917 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2918 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2919 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2920 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2922 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2923 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2924 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2927 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2931 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2932 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2934 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2935 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2936 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2938 ** Improved robustness
2940 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2941 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2942 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2945 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2949 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2950 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2951 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2952 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2953 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2955 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2959 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2962 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2966 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2967 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2968 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2969 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2971 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2972 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2974 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2975 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2976 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2979 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2981 ** Improved robustness
2983 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2984 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2986 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2987 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2988 or NFS-mounted partition.
2990 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2991 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2995 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2996 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2997 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2998 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2999 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3000 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3002 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3003 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3005 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3006 or neglect to report file removal.
3008 For the "groups" command:
3010 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3011 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3013 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3015 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3017 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3021 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3022 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3025 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3027 ** Changes in behavior
3029 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3030 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3031 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3032 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3034 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3035 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3036 a final './' or '../' component.
3038 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3039 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3040 this only for pipes.
3042 ** Infrastructure changes
3044 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3045 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3046 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3047 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3051 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3052 name is "." or "..".
3054 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3055 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3056 dirent.d_type support.
3058 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3059 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3061 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3062 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3063 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3064 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3067 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3069 ** Changes in behavior
3071 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3075 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3076 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3080 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3081 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3082 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3084 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3085 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3087 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3088 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3090 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3092 ** Improved robustness
3094 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3095 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3096 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3098 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3099 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3102 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3103 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3105 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3106 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3108 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3109 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3111 ** Changes in behavior
3113 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3114 where the two are distinct.
3116 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3117 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3118 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3119 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3120 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3121 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3122 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3123 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3124 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3125 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3126 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3127 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3128 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3129 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3130 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3131 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3132 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3134 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3135 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3136 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3138 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3139 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3140 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3141 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3144 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3145 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3149 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3150 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3151 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3152 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3154 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3155 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3156 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3158 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3159 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3160 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3161 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3162 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3165 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3166 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3168 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3169 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3170 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3171 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3173 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3174 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3175 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3177 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3178 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3179 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3180 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3182 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3183 and sticky) with the -m option.
3185 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3186 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3187 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3188 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3189 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3191 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3192 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3194 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3198 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3199 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3200 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3201 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3203 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3205 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3207 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3208 silently ignoring one of them.
3210 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3211 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3212 containing this change was 5.92.
3214 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3215 automatically newline terminated.
3217 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3218 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3219 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3220 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3223 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3224 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3225 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3228 ** Scheduled for removal
3230 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3231 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3233 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3234 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3235 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3236 command to unlink a directory.
3238 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3239 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3240 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3241 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3245 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3246 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3247 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3248 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3249 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3250 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3254 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3255 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3257 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3259 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3260 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3261 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3263 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3264 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3267 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3268 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3270 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3271 list directories before files.
3273 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3274 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3275 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3276 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3279 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3281 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3283 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3284 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3285 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3287 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3288 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3292 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3293 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3294 usually printing nothing.
3296 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3298 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3299 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3300 them with hard-linked directories.
3302 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3303 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3304 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3306 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3307 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3308 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3310 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3313 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3314 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3316 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3317 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3319 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3320 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3322 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3323 all command-line arguments.
3325 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3327 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3329 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3330 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3332 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3334 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3335 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3336 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3337 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3338 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3340 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3341 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3343 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3344 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3345 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3346 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3348 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3350 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3354 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3355 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3357 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3358 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3360 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3361 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3363 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3364 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3366 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3367 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3369 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3371 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3372 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3373 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3376 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3378 ** Build-related bug fixes
3380 installing .mo files would fail
3383 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3387 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3389 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3392 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3396 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3397 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3401 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3403 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3404 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3406 ** Deprecated options
3408 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3409 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3411 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3415 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3417 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3418 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3419 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3420 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3422 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3425 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3431 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3436 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3438 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3440 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3441 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3442 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3444 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3445 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3446 problematic usages. These include:
3448 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3449 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3450 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3451 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3452 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3453 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3454 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3455 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3456 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3458 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3459 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3461 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3462 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3463 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3464 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3466 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3467 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3468 between binary and text files.
3470 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3474 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3478 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3479 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3481 head tac tail tee tr
3482 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3484 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3485 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3487 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3488 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3489 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3491 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3493 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3495 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3496 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3497 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3501 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3503 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3504 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3506 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3507 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3508 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3512 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3513 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3517 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3518 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3519 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3523 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3524 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3528 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3530 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3532 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3536 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3537 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3538 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3540 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3541 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3542 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3543 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3544 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3546 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3550 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3551 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3552 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3554 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3556 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3557 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3558 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3559 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3561 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3563 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3564 rather than silently wrapping around.
3566 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3567 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3569 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3570 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3572 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3573 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3574 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3575 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3577 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3579 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3581 ** Improved robustness
3583 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3584 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3585 no matter how large the result.
3587 ** Improved portability
3589 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3590 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3592 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3594 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3595 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3596 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3598 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3599 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3603 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3604 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3606 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3608 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3609 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3610 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3611 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3613 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3614 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3616 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3617 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3618 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3620 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3622 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3623 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3625 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3626 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3628 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3630 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3631 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3633 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3634 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3636 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3637 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3638 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3640 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3642 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3644 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3648 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3650 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3651 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3652 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3654 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3655 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3657 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3658 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3659 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3661 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3662 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3664 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3665 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3666 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3667 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3669 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3670 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3672 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3673 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3674 the file system does not support it.
3676 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3678 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3679 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3681 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3683 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3684 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3686 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3687 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3688 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3689 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3691 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3692 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3695 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3696 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3697 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3698 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3700 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3701 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3702 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3703 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3705 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3706 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3708 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3710 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3711 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3712 reporting incorrect results.
3716 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3717 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3719 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3722 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3724 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3725 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3727 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3728 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3730 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3733 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3734 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3735 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3736 the file name does not look like a page range.
3738 printf has several changes:
3740 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3741 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3743 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3744 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3745 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3747 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3748 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3751 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3752 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3754 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3755 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3757 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3759 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3760 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3762 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3764 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3766 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3767 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3768 when first encountering the directory.
3772 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3773 output; POSIX requires this.
3775 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3776 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3778 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3780 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3781 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3783 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3784 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3786 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3787 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3788 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3789 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3790 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3791 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3792 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3794 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3795 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3796 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3798 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3799 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3801 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3803 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3805 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3806 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3807 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3808 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3810 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3814 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3815 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3816 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3817 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3818 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3820 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3821 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3822 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3824 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3825 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3827 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3828 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3830 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3831 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
3832 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
3833 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3834 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
3836 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3837 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3839 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3840 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3842 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3844 nocreat do not create the output file
3845 excl fail if the output file already exists
3846 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3847 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3849 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3851 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3852 direct use direct I/O for data
3853 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3854 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3855 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3856 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3857 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3859 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3861 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3862 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3865 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3866 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3867 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3868 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3869 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3870 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3872 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3873 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3875 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3878 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3880 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3882 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3883 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3885 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3886 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3887 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3889 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3890 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3891 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3893 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3895 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3896 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
3898 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3899 for compatibility with bash.
3901 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3903 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3904 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3905 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3906 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3908 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3909 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3911 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3912 ls supports TABSIZE.
3913 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3914 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3915 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3917 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3920 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3922 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3923 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3924 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3925 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3926 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3927 an offset, not as a file name.
3929 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3930 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3932 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3933 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3935 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3936 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3938 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3939 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3940 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3942 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3943 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3945 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3946 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3950 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3952 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3954 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3958 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3959 or more arguments between partitions.
3961 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3962 holes in the destination.
3964 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3965 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3966 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3967 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3968 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3969 terminates immediately.
3971 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3973 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3975 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3976 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3977 not the empty string.
3979 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3980 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3984 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3985 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3986 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3989 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3996 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4000 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4001 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4003 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4004 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4006 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4007 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4008 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4011 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4015 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4016 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4018 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4019 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4021 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4022 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4023 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4025 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4027 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4030 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4032 ** Configuration option
4034 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4035 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4039 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4040 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4044 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4045 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4046 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4049 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4050 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4051 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4052 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4053 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4054 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4055 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4058 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4062 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4063 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4064 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4066 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4067 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4069 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4071 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4072 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4073 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4074 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4076 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4078 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4079 not just the ones that reference directories
4081 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4082 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4084 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4085 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4086 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4088 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4089 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4090 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4091 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4092 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4093 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4095 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4100 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4101 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4103 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4105 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4107 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4109 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4110 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4112 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4113 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4115 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4117 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4121 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4123 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4125 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4126 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4127 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4128 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4129 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4131 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4132 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4134 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4135 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4137 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4138 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4140 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4141 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4142 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4146 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4147 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4148 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4149 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4150 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4151 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4152 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4153 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4154 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4155 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4156 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4157 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4158 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4159 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4161 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4163 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4164 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4166 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4168 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4170 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4171 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4173 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4175 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4176 without a trailing newline.
4178 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4179 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4181 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4184 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4188 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4190 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4192 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4193 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4194 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4195 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4197 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4199 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4200 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4201 be printed without leading spaces.
4203 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4204 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4209 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4210 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4211 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4213 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4215 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4216 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4218 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4219 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4221 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4222 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4224 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4226 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4228 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4230 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4231 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4233 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4235 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4237 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4238 byte offsets are specified.
4241 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4244 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4247 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4248 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4249 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4250 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4251 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4252 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4253 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4254 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4255 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4256 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4257 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4258 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4259 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4260 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4261 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4262 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4263 directory where M has write access.
4264 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4265 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4266 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4269 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4270 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4271 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4272 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4273 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4274 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4275 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4276 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4277 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4278 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4279 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4280 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4281 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4282 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4283 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4284 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4285 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4286 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4287 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4288 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4289 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4290 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4291 appeared one additional time.
4293 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4294 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4295 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4296 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4299 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4300 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4301 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4302 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4303 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4304 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4305 if there were more than 338.
4307 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4308 - false --help now exits nonzero
4311 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4312 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4313 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4314 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4317 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4318 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4319 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4320 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4321 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4324 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4325 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4326 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4327 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4328 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4329 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4330 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4333 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4334 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4335 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4336 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4337 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4338 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4340 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4341 under certain unusual conditions
4342 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4343 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4346 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4347 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4348 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4349 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4350 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4351 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4352 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4353 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4354 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4355 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4356 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4357 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4358 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4359 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4360 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4361 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4364 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4365 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4368 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4369 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4370 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4371 involving hard-linked directories
4372 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4373 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4374 character-special and block files
4377 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4378 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4379 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4380 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4381 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4382 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4383 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4384 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4385 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4387 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4388 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4389 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4390 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4391 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4392 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4393 specified on the command line.
4394 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4395 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4396 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4397 the first file untouched.
4398 * readlink: new program
4399 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4400 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4401 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4402 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4403 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4404 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4407 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4408 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4409 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4410 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4411 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4412 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4413 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4414 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4415 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4416 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4417 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4418 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4420 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4421 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4422 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4424 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4425 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4426 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4427 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4428 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4429 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4430 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4431 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4434 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4435 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4438 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4439 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4440 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4441 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4442 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4443 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4444 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4447 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4448 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4450 ========================================================================
4451 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4452 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4455 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4457 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4458 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4459 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4460 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4461 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4462 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4463 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4464 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4465 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4466 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4467 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4468 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4470 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4471 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4472 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4473 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4475 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4478 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4480 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4481 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4482 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4483 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4484 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4485 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4486 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4489 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4490 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4491 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4492 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4493 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4494 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4495 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4496 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4497 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4498 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4499 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4500 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4501 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4502 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4503 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4504 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4506 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4507 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4509 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4510 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4511 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4512 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4513 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4514 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4516 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4517 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4518 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4519 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4520 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4521 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4522 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4524 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4525 the source files in the following example:
4526 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4527 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4528 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4529 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4530 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4531 links between source files with --preserve=links
4532 * cp accepts new options:
4533 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4534 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4535 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4536 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4537 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4538 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4539 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4540 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4541 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4543 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4544 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4545 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4546 even though it's older than dest.
4547 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4548 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4549 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4550 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4551 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4553 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4554 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4555 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4556 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4557 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4558 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4559 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4561 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4562 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4563 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4565 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4566 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4567 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4568 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4569 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4570 This is the default.
4572 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4573 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4574 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4575 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4576 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4578 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4581 ========================================================================
4582 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4583 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4586 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4587 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4589 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4590 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4591 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4592 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4593 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4595 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4596 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4597 that specifies a non-directory
4600 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4601 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4602 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4603 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4604 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4605 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4606 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4607 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4608 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4609 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4610 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4611 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4612 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4613 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4614 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4615 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4616 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4617 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4618 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4619 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4620 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4621 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4622 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4623 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4625 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4626 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4627 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4629 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4631 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4632 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4634 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4635 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4636 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4637 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4638 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4640 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4641 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4642 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4643 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4644 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4646 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4648 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4649 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4650 * still more portability fixes
4651 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4652 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4654 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4656 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4658 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4660 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4661 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4662 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4663 there is any time remaining
4664 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4666 ========================================================================
4667 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4668 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4670 This package began as the union of the following:
4671 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4673 ========================================================================
4675 Copyright (C) 2001-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4677 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4678 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4679 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4680 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4681 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4682 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.