1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
6 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
10 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
11 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
13 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
14 before data copying has started.
16 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
17 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
19 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
20 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
21 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
22 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
24 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
25 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
26 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
27 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
29 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
34 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
35 for its standard streams.
37 ** Changes in behavior
39 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
40 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
41 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
42 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
43 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
44 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
48 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
49 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
53 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
55 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
56 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
59 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
61 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
62 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
64 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
65 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
68 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
72 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
73 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
74 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
75 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
77 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
78 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
79 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
80 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
81 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
86 make check: two tests have been corrected
90 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
91 inherited from gnulib.
94 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
98 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
99 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
100 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
101 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
103 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
104 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
106 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
108 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
109 systems without xattr support.
111 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
112 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
113 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
115 ** Changes in behavior
117 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
118 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
119 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
120 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
122 ** Improved robustness
124 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
125 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
126 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
127 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
128 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
129 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
130 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
131 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
132 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
136 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
137 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
139 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
140 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
141 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
142 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
143 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
146 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
150 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
151 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
152 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
156 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
157 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
158 data was read, or on process exit.
159 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
161 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
162 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
163 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
164 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
166 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
167 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
168 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
169 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
171 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
172 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
174 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
175 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
177 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
178 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
179 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
181 ** Changes in behavior
183 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
184 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
185 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
187 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
188 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
190 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
191 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
192 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
195 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
199 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
201 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
202 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
203 install: Never copies xattrs
205 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
206 from overwriting any existing destination file
208 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
209 mode where this feature is available.
211 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
212 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
213 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
214 do not modify the destination at all.
216 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
218 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
222 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
225 cp uses much less memory in some situations
227 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
228 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
230 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
231 processing the first file name
233 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
234 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
235 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
236 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
238 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
239 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
241 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
242 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
245 ** Changes in behavior
247 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
248 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
250 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
251 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
252 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
254 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
255 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
257 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
259 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
260 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
261 is still marked with a '+'.
264 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
268 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
269 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
273 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
274 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
275 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
276 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
277 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
278 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
280 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
281 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
283 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
284 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
286 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
288 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
289 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
290 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
292 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
293 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
295 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
296 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
297 used to factor large numbers.
299 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
302 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
304 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
306 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
307 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
309 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
310 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
311 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
312 maximum command-line (argv) length.
314 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
315 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
316 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
318 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
319 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
323 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
325 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
326 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
328 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
329 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
331 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
333 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
334 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
338 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
339 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
340 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
342 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
344 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
345 no matter how many files are in a given directory
347 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
348 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
349 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
351 ** Changes in behavior
353 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
354 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
357 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
361 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
363 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
364 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
365 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
367 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
368 with no USERNAME argument.
370 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
371 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
372 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
374 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
375 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
376 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
377 number of fields for some inputs.
379 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
380 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
382 ** Changes in behavior
384 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
385 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
388 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
392 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
394 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
395 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
396 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
397 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
399 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
400 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
402 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
403 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
405 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
406 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
408 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
409 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
410 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
411 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
413 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
414 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
415 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
416 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
417 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
418 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
420 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
421 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
423 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
424 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
427 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
428 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
430 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
431 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
433 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
434 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
435 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
436 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
438 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
439 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
441 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
442 in more cases when a directory is empty.
444 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
445 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
446 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
450 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
451 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
453 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
454 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
455 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
456 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
460 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
461 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
463 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
465 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
469 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
470 which have negative errno values.
474 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
478 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
482 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
486 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
490 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
491 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
492 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
494 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
495 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
496 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
501 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
502 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
503 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
504 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
507 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
511 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
513 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
514 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
515 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
518 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
522 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
523 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
525 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
527 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
529 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
531 ** Programs no longer installed by default
535 ** Changes in behavior
537 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
538 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
540 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
541 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
543 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
544 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
545 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
549 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
550 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
551 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
552 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
553 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
554 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
555 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
556 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
557 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
558 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
559 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
561 The following commands and options now support the standard size
562 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
563 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
566 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
569 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
570 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
571 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
573 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
574 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
575 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
580 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
581 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
582 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
583 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
585 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
586 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
587 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
588 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
589 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
590 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
591 of "make check" fail.
593 ** Remove deprecated options
595 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
596 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
597 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
598 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
599 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
601 ** Improved robustness
603 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
604 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
605 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
606 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
607 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
608 loss of the contents of a/f.
610 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
611 in its 35-colon command-line argument
615 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
616 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
619 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
620 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
621 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
622 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
624 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
625 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
626 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
627 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
628 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
629 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
630 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
631 destination is a symlink.
633 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
635 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
636 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
638 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
639 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
641 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
643 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
644 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
646 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
647 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
649 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
652 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
653 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
655 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
656 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
658 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
659 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
660 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
661 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
663 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
664 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
665 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
667 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
668 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
669 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
671 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
672 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
673 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
674 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
676 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
677 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
678 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
680 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
681 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
683 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
684 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
686 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
688 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
689 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
690 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
692 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
693 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
695 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
696 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
698 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
699 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
701 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
702 [present in the original version]
705 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
709 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
711 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
712 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
713 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
715 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
716 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
718 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
722 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
723 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
725 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
726 support but with insufficient /proc support.
728 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
729 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
731 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
732 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
733 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
734 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
735 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
736 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
738 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
739 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
742 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
743 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
745 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
748 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
749 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
750 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
752 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
753 directory is unreadable.
755 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
756 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
757 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
759 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
760 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
761 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
762 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
763 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
766 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
767 Before it would print nothing.
769 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
771 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
772 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
773 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
774 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
775 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
776 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
777 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
778 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
780 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
784 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
785 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
786 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
788 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
789 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
790 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
791 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
794 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
798 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
799 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
800 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
801 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
802 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
803 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
804 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
806 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
807 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
808 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
809 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
810 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
811 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
812 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
813 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
815 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
816 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
817 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
820 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
824 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
825 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
827 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
828 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
829 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
831 ** Improved robustness
833 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
834 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
835 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
838 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
842 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
843 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
844 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
845 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
846 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
848 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
852 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
855 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
859 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
860 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
861 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
862 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
864 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
865 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
867 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
868 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
869 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
872 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
874 ** Improved robustness
876 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
877 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
879 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
880 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
881 or NFS-mounted partition.
883 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
884 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
888 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
889 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
890 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
891 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
892 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
893 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
895 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
896 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
898 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
899 or neglect to report file removal.
901 For the "groups" command:
903 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
904 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
906 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
908 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
910 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
914 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
915 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
918 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
920 ** Changes in behavior
922 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
923 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
924 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
925 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
927 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
928 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
929 a final `./' or `../' component.
931 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
932 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
935 ** Infrastructure changes
937 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
938 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
939 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
940 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
944 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
947 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
948 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
949 dirent.d_type support.
951 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
952 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
954 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
955 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
956 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
957 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
960 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
962 ** Changes in behavior
964 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
968 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
969 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
973 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
974 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
975 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
977 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
978 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
980 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
981 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
983 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
985 ** Improved robustness
987 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
988 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
989 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
991 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
992 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
995 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
996 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
998 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
999 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1001 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1002 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1004 ** Changes in behavior
1006 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1007 where the two are distinct.
1009 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1010 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1011 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1012 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1013 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1014 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1015 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1016 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1017 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1018 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1019 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1020 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1021 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1022 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1023 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1024 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1025 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1027 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1028 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1029 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1031 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1032 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1033 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1034 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1037 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1038 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1042 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1043 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1044 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1045 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1047 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1048 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1049 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1051 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1052 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1053 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1054 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1055 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1058 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1059 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1061 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1062 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1063 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1064 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1066 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1067 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1068 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1070 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1071 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1072 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1073 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1075 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1076 and sticky) with the -m option.
1078 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1079 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1080 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1081 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1082 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1084 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1085 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1087 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1091 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1092 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1093 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1094 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1096 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1098 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1100 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1101 silently ignoring one of them.
1103 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1104 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1105 containing this change was 5.92.
1107 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1108 automatically newline terminated.
1110 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1111 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1112 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1113 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1116 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1117 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1118 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1121 ** Scheduled for removal
1123 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1124 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1126 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1127 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1128 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1129 command to unlink a directory.
1131 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1132 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1133 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1134 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1138 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1139 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1140 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1141 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1142 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1143 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1147 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1148 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1150 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1152 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1153 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1154 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1156 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1157 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1160 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1161 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1163 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1164 list directories before files.
1166 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1167 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1168 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1169 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1172 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1174 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1176 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1177 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1178 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1180 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1181 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1185 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1186 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1187 usually printing nothing.
1189 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1191 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1192 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1193 them with hard-linked directories.
1195 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1196 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1197 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1199 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1200 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1201 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1203 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1206 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1207 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1209 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1210 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1212 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1213 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1215 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1216 all command-line arguments.
1218 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1220 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1222 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1223 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1225 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1227 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1228 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1229 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1230 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1231 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1233 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1234 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1236 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1237 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1238 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1239 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1241 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1243 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1247 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1248 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1250 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1251 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1253 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1254 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1256 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1257 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1259 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1260 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1262 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1264 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1265 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1266 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1269 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1271 ** Build-related bug fixes
1273 installing .mo files would fail
1276 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1280 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1282 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1285 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1289 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1290 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1294 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1296 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1297 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1299 ** Deprecated options
1301 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1302 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1304 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1308 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1310 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1311 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1312 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1313 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1315 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1318 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1324 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1329 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1331 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1333 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1334 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1335 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1337 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1338 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1339 problematic usages. These include:
1341 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1342 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1343 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1344 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1345 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1346 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1347 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1348 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1349 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1351 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1352 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1354 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1355 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1356 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1357 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1359 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1360 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1361 between binary and text files.
1363 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1367 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1371 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1372 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1374 head tac tail tee tr
1375 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1377 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1378 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1380 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1381 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1382 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1384 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1386 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1388 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1389 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1390 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1394 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1396 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1397 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1399 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1400 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1401 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1405 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1406 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1410 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1411 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1412 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1416 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1417 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1421 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1423 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1425 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1429 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1430 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1431 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1433 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1434 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1435 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1436 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1437 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1439 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1443 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1444 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1445 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1447 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1449 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1450 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1451 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1452 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1454 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1456 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1457 rather than silently wrapping around.
1459 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1460 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1462 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1463 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1465 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1466 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1467 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1468 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1470 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1472 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
1474 ** Improved robustness
1476 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
1477 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
1478 no matter how large the result.
1480 ** Improved portability
1482 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
1483 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
1485 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
1487 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
1488 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
1489 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
1491 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
1492 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
1496 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
1497 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
1499 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
1501 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
1502 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
1503 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
1504 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
1506 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
1507 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
1509 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
1510 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
1511 categories if not specified by dircolors.
1513 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
1515 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
1516 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
1518 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
1519 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
1521 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
1523 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
1524 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
1526 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
1527 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
1529 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
1530 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
1531 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
1533 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
1535 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
1537 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
1541 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
1543 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
1544 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
1545 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
1547 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
1548 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
1550 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
1551 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
1552 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
1554 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
1555 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
1557 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
1558 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
1559 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
1560 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
1562 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
1563 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
1565 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
1566 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
1567 the file system does not support it.
1569 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
1571 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
1572 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
1574 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
1576 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
1577 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
1579 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
1580 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
1581 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
1582 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
1584 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
1585 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
1588 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
1589 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
1590 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
1591 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
1593 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
1594 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
1595 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
1596 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
1598 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
1599 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
1601 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
1603 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
1604 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
1605 reporting incorrect results.
1609 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
1610 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
1612 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
1615 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
1617 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
1618 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
1620 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
1621 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
1623 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
1626 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
1627 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
1628 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
1629 the file name does not look like a page range.
1631 printf has several changes:
1633 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
1634 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
1636 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
1637 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
1638 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
1640 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
1641 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
1644 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
1645 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
1647 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
1648 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
1650 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
1652 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
1653 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
1655 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
1657 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
1659 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
1660 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
1661 when first encountering the directory.
1665 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
1666 output; POSIX requires this.
1668 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
1669 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
1671 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
1673 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
1674 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
1676 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
1677 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
1679 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
1680 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
1681 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
1682 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
1683 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
1684 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
1685 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
1687 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
1688 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
1689 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
1691 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
1692 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
1694 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
1696 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
1698 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
1699 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
1700 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
1701 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
1703 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
1707 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
1708 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
1709 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
1710 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
1711 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
1713 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
1714 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
1715 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
1717 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
1718 is longer than PATH_MAX.
1720 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
1721 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
1723 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
1724 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
1725 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
1726 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
1727 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
1729 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
1730 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
1732 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
1733 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
1735 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
1737 nocreat do not create the output file
1738 excl fail if the output file already exists
1739 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
1740 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
1742 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
1744 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
1745 direct use direct I/O for data
1746 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
1747 sync likewise, but also for metadata
1748 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
1749 nofollow do not follow symlinks
1750 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
1752 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
1754 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
1755 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
1758 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
1759 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
1760 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
1761 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
1762 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
1763 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
1765 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1766 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1768 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
1771 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
1773 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
1775 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
1776 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
1778 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
1779 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
1780 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
1782 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
1783 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
1784 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
1786 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
1788 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
1789 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
1791 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
1792 for compatibility with bash.
1794 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
1796 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
1797 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
1798 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
1799 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
1801 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
1802 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
1804 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
1805 ls supports TABSIZE.
1806 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
1807 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
1808 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
1810 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
1813 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
1815 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
1816 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
1817 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
1818 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
1819 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
1820 an offset, not as a file name.
1822 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
1823 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
1825 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
1826 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
1828 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
1829 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
1831 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
1832 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
1833 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
1835 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
1836 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
1838 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
1839 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
1843 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
1845 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
1847 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
1851 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
1852 or more arguments between partitions.
1854 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
1855 holes in the destination.
1857 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
1858 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
1859 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
1860 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
1861 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
1862 terminates immediately.
1864 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
1866 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
1868 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
1869 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
1870 not the empty string.
1872 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
1873 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
1877 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
1878 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
1879 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
1882 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
1889 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
1893 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
1894 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
1896 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
1897 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
1899 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
1900 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
1901 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
1904 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
1908 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
1909 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
1911 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
1912 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
1914 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
1915 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
1916 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
1918 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
1920 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
1923 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
1925 ** Configuration option
1927 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
1928 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
1932 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
1933 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
1937 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
1938 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
1939 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
1942 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
1943 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
1944 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
1945 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
1946 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
1947 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
1948 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
1951 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
1955 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
1956 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
1957 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
1959 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
1960 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
1962 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
1964 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
1965 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
1966 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
1967 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
1969 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
1971 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
1972 not just the ones that reference directories
1974 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
1975 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
1977 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
1978 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
1979 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
1981 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
1982 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
1983 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
1984 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
1985 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
1986 ragged when a datum was too wide.
1988 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
1993 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
1994 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
1996 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
1998 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2000 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2002 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2003 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2005 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2006 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2008 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2010 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2014 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2016 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2018 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2019 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2020 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2021 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2022 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2024 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2025 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2027 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2028 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2030 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2031 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2033 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2034 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2035 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2039 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2040 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2041 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2042 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2043 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2044 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2045 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2046 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2047 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2048 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2049 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2050 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2051 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2052 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2054 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2056 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2057 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2059 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2061 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2063 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2064 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2066 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2068 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2069 without a trailing newline.
2071 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2072 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2074 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2077 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2081 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2083 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2085 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2086 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2087 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2088 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2090 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2092 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2093 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2094 be printed without leading spaces.
2096 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2097 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2102 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2103 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2104 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2106 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2108 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2109 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2111 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2112 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2114 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2115 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2117 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2119 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2121 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2123 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2124 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2126 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2128 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2130 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2131 byte offsets are specified.
2134 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2137 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2140 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2141 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2142 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2143 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2144 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2145 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2146 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2147 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2148 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2149 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2150 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2151 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2152 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2153 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2154 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2155 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2156 directory where M has write access.
2157 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2158 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2159 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2162 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2163 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2164 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2165 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2166 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2167 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2168 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2169 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2170 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2171 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2172 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2173 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2174 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2175 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2176 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2177 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2178 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2179 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2180 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2181 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2182 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2183 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2184 appeared one additional time.
2186 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2187 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2188 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2189 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2192 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2193 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2194 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2195 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2196 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2197 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2198 if there were more than 338.
2200 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2201 - false --help now exits nonzero
2204 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2205 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2206 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2207 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2210 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2211 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2212 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2213 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2214 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2217 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2218 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2219 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2220 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2221 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2222 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2223 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2226 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2227 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2228 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2229 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2230 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2231 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2233 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2234 under certain unusual conditions
2235 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2236 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2239 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2240 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2241 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2242 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2243 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2244 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2245 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2246 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2247 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2248 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2249 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2250 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2251 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2252 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2253 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2254 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2257 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2258 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2261 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2262 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2263 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2264 involving hard-linked directories
2265 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2266 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2267 character-special and block files
2270 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2271 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2272 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2273 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2274 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2275 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2276 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2277 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2278 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2280 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2281 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2282 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2283 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2284 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2285 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2286 specified on the command line.
2287 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2288 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2289 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2290 the first file untouched.
2291 * readlink: new program
2292 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2293 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2294 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2295 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2296 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2297 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2300 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2301 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2302 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2303 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2304 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2305 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2306 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2307 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2308 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2309 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2310 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2311 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2313 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2314 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2315 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2317 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2318 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2319 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2320 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2321 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2322 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2323 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2324 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2327 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2328 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2331 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2332 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2333 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2334 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2335 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2336 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2337 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2340 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2341 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2343 ========================================================================
2344 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2345 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2348 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2350 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2351 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2352 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2353 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2354 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2355 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2356 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2357 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2358 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2359 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2360 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2361 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2363 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2364 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2365 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2366 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2368 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2371 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2373 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2374 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2375 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2376 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2377 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2378 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2379 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2382 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2383 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2384 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2385 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2386 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2387 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2388 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2389 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2390 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2391 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2392 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2393 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2394 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2395 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2396 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2397 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2399 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2400 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2402 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2403 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2404 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2405 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2406 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2407 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2409 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2410 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2411 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2412 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2413 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2414 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2415 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2417 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2418 the source files in the following example:
2419 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2420 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2421 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2422 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2423 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2424 links between source files with --preserve=links
2425 * cp accepts new options:
2426 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2427 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2428 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2429 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2430 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2431 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2432 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2433 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2434 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2436 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2437 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2438 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2439 even though it's older than dest.
2440 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2441 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2442 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2443 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2444 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2446 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2447 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2448 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2449 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2450 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2451 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2452 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2454 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2455 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2456 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2458 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2459 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2460 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2461 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2462 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2463 This is the default.
2465 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2466 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2467 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2468 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2469 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2471 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
2474 ========================================================================
2475 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
2476 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2479 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
2480 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
2482 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2483 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
2484 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
2485 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
2486 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
2488 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
2489 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
2490 that specifies a non-directory
2493 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
2494 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
2495 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
2496 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
2497 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
2498 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
2499 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
2500 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2501 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
2502 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
2503 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
2504 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
2505 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
2506 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
2507 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
2508 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
2509 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
2510 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
2511 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
2512 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
2513 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
2514 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
2515 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
2516 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
2518 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
2519 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
2520 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
2522 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
2524 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
2525 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
2527 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
2528 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
2529 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
2530 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
2531 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
2533 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
2534 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
2535 required support; from Bruno Haible.
2536 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
2537 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
2539 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
2541 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
2542 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
2543 * still more portability fixes
2544 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
2545 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2547 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
2549 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
2551 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
2553 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
2554 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
2555 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
2556 there is any time remaining
2557 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
2559 ========================================================================
2560 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
2561 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
2563 This package began as the union of the following:
2564 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
2566 ========================================================================
2568 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
2570 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
2571 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
2572 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
2573 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
2574 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
2575 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.