1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
11 id now supports specifying multiple users.
14 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
18 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
19 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
20 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
21 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
22 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
23 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
25 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
26 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
27 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
28 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
30 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
31 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
32 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
33 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
34 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
35 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
37 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
38 even if it can't be traversed.
39 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
41 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
42 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
43 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
45 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
46 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
48 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
49 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
50 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
51 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, ‘mv -n A A’
52 now silently does nothing if A exists.
53 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
55 ** Changes in behavior
57 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
58 it is self referential.
60 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
64 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
66 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
69 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
70 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
73 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
74 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
75 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
77 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
78 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
82 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
83 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
85 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
86 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
87 and tail -f uses inotify.
89 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
90 which is especially significant on macOS.
93 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
97 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
98 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
100 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
101 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
102 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
103 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
105 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
106 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
108 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
109 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
111 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
112 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
115 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
116 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
118 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
119 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
120 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
122 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
123 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
124 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
125 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
130 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
134 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
136 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
137 rather than reading from the start.
139 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
140 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
141 for unknown long options.
145 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
146 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
149 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
153 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
154 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
155 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
156 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
158 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
159 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
160 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
161 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
162 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
164 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
165 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
166 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
167 now fails instead of losing the data.
168 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
170 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
171 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
172 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
174 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
175 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
178 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
179 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
180 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
182 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
183 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
186 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
187 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
190 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
191 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
192 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
194 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
195 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
196 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
198 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
199 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
200 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
202 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
203 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
205 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
206 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
209 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
210 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
212 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
213 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
214 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
215 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
217 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
218 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
219 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
221 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
222 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
225 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
226 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
230 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
231 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
232 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
234 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
235 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
237 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
238 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
240 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
241 executing the subsidiary program.
243 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
245 ** Changes in behavior
247 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
248 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
249 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
250 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
254 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
256 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
257 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
259 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
260 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
261 is effective in this case.
264 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
268 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
269 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
270 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
272 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
273 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
274 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
276 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
277 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
278 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
280 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
281 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
282 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
284 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
285 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
286 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
288 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
289 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
290 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
291 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
292 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
294 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
295 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
296 depending on the size of the first file processed.
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
301 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
302 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
303 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
304 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
306 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
307 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
308 time zone is indeterminate.
310 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
311 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
312 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
313 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
315 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
316 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
317 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
319 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
320 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
322 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
323 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
324 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
328 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
329 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
330 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
333 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
337 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
338 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
341 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
342 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
343 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
345 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
346 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
347 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
348 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
349 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
351 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
352 System V style platforms where this information is available only
353 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
355 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
356 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
358 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
359 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
362 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
363 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
364 defaults to a different SELinux context.
366 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
369 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
370 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
371 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
373 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
374 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
376 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
377 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
378 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
380 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
382 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
383 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
385 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
386 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
388 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
389 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
391 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
394 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
395 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
396 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
397 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
399 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
400 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
401 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
403 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
404 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
405 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
407 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
408 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
409 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
411 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
412 only doing so if --retry is specified.
413 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
415 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
416 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
418 ** Changes in behavior
420 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
422 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
423 values for any argument.
425 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
426 they are out of localtime range.
428 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
429 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
430 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
431 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
435 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
436 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
437 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
439 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
440 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
442 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
443 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
445 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
447 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
448 written to a terminal.
450 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
451 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
453 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
454 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
455 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
456 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
457 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
458 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
459 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
460 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
461 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
462 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
463 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
465 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
466 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
470 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
471 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
475 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
477 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
478 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
480 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
483 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
487 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
488 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
489 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
492 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
493 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
495 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
496 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
499 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
500 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
502 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
503 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
504 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
506 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
507 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
509 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
510 that specify an offset for the first field.
511 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
513 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
518 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
519 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
523 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
524 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
526 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
527 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
528 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
529 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
530 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
532 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
533 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
534 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
536 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
537 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
538 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
540 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
541 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
543 ** Changes in behavior
545 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
546 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
548 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
549 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
551 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
552 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
554 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
555 when outputting to a terminal.
557 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
561 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
562 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
564 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
565 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
567 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
568 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
569 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
571 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
572 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
574 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
575 upon detection of a directory cycle.
576 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
578 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
580 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
581 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
582 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
584 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
585 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
588 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
592 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
593 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
595 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
596 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
598 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
599 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
600 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
602 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
603 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
604 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
605 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
607 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
608 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
609 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
610 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
612 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
613 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
615 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
616 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
618 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
619 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
620 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
622 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
623 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
624 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
626 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
627 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
628 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
630 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
631 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
632 character at the 4GiB position.
633 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
635 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
636 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
638 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
639 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
641 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
642 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
645 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
646 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
648 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
649 replaced before inotify watches were created.
650 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
652 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
653 [bug introduced in the beginning]
655 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
656 when those files are being created or renamed.
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
661 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
662 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
663 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
664 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
666 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
667 on stderr approximately every second.
669 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
670 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
672 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
673 other than the default newline character.
675 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
676 a useful setting with high latency links.
678 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
679 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
681 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
682 and output errors in general.
684 ** Changes in behavior
686 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
687 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
688 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
689 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
691 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
692 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
693 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
694 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
695 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
697 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
698 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
700 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
702 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
703 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
705 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
706 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
710 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
711 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
713 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
714 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
716 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
717 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
719 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
720 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
722 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
724 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
725 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
726 documentation are provided.
729 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
733 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
734 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
736 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
737 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
738 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
739 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
741 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
742 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
743 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
744 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
746 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
747 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
749 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
750 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
752 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
753 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
754 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
755 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
756 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
757 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
771 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
773 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
774 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
775 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
776 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
777 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
778 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
780 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
781 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
782 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
783 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
785 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
786 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
787 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
789 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
790 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
791 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
792 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
794 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
795 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
796 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
798 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
799 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
800 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
802 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
803 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
804 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
805 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
806 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
808 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
809 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
810 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
812 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
813 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
815 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
816 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
817 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
819 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
820 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
822 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
823 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
825 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
826 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
828 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
829 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
831 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
832 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
833 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
835 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
836 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
840 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
841 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
843 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
844 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
845 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
846 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
847 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
848 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
849 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
850 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
851 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
852 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
853 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
854 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
855 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
856 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
857 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
858 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
859 it suitable for embedded system.
861 ** Changes in behavior
863 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
864 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
866 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
867 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
869 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
870 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
871 will result in the delayed output of lines.
873 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
874 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
875 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
879 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
880 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
881 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
883 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
885 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
886 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
887 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
889 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
890 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
891 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
892 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
894 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
895 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
897 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
898 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
899 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
902 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
906 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
907 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
908 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
910 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
911 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
912 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
913 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
915 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
916 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
917 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
919 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
920 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
922 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
924 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
925 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
926 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
928 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
929 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
930 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
932 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
933 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
934 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
935 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
937 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
938 from the source, when copying across file systems.
939 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
941 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
942 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
943 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
945 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
946 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
948 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
949 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
950 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
951 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
953 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
954 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
955 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
957 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
958 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
959 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
963 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
964 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
965 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
967 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
968 used to identify the split points.
970 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
971 command line argument through to the output.
973 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
976 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
977 a NUL instead of a white space character.
979 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
980 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
982 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
984 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
985 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
986 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
988 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
989 unique groups with empty lines.
991 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
992 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
994 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
997 ** Changes in behavior
999 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1000 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1001 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1002 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1004 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1005 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1007 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1008 not just the transfer counts.
1010 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1012 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1013 as per the documented interface.
1017 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1019 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1020 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1021 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1022 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1024 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1025 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1026 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1027 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1029 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1030 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1031 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1033 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1034 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1036 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1037 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1039 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1043 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1046 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1050 numfmt: reformat numbers
1054 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1055 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1056 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1058 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1059 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1060 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1062 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1063 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1067 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1070 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1071 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1072 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1074 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1075 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1076 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1078 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1079 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1080 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1082 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1083 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1084 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1086 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1087 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1088 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1090 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1091 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1093 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1094 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1096 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1097 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1098 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1100 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1101 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1102 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1104 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1105 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1106 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1108 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1109 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1110 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1111 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1113 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1114 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1115 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1117 ** Changes in behavior
1119 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1120 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1121 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1122 'total' in the target column.
1124 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1125 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1126 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1128 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1129 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1131 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1132 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1136 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1137 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1139 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1140 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1142 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1146 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1147 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1148 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1149 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1150 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1151 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1152 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1153 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1154 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1155 for a patched distribution package.
1157 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1158 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1160 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1161 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1162 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1163 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1166 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1170 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1172 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1173 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1174 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1178 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1179 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1180 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1181 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1184 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1185 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1187 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1188 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1189 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1190 eventually exits nonzero.
1192 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1193 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1194 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1195 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1196 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1198 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1199 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1200 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1202 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1203 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1204 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1206 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1207 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1208 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1210 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1211 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1212 Before, this would infloop:
1213 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1214 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1216 ** Changes in behavior
1218 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1222 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1223 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1224 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1225 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1226 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1229 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1230 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1231 format-changing options.
1233 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1234 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1235 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1236 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1237 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1241 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1242 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1243 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1244 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1245 are run without following the instructions in README.
1247 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1248 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1249 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1250 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1251 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1252 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1253 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1256 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1260 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1261 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1262 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1263 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1265 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1266 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1267 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1270 sort -u could read freed memory.
1271 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1272 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1273 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1277 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1278 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1279 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1280 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1283 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1287 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1288 processes will not intersperse their output.
1289 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1291 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1292 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1293 date: invalid date '\260'
1294 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1296 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1297 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1298 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1299 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1301 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1302 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1303 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1305 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1306 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1307 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1308 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1309 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1310 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1312 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1313 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1315 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1316 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1318 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1319 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1320 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1322 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1323 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1324 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1328 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1330 ** Changes in behavior
1332 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1333 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1334 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1335 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1336 have any reason to include it here.
1340 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1341 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1342 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1344 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1345 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1346 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1349 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1353 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1354 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1355 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1356 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1357 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1358 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1360 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1361 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1362 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1363 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1364 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1365 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1366 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1368 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1369 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1371 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1372 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1376 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1377 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1379 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1381 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1383 ** Changes in behavior
1385 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1386 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1387 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1389 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1390 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1393 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1397 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1398 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1399 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1400 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1401 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1402 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1403 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1404 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1406 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1407 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1408 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1409 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1410 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1412 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1413 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1415 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1416 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1418 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1419 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1421 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1422 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1424 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1425 additional static suffix to output file names.
1427 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1428 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1429 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1431 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1432 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1436 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1437 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1438 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1440 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1441 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1442 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1443 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1444 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1445 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1447 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1448 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1449 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1450 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1451 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1453 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1454 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1455 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1456 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1460 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1461 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1462 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1464 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1465 instead of causing a usage failure.
1467 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1470 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1474 realpath: print resolved file names.
1478 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1479 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1481 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1482 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1484 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1485 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1486 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1487 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1488 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1489 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1491 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1492 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1493 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1495 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1496 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1497 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1499 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1500 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1501 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1502 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1503 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1505 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1507 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1508 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1510 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1511 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1512 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1514 ** Changes in behavior
1516 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1517 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1518 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1519 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1520 usually-short referent instead.
1522 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1523 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1524 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1525 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1528 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1532 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1533 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1534 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1536 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1537 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1539 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1540 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1544 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1545 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1547 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1548 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1549 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1550 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1552 ** Changes in behavior
1554 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1555 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1556 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1560 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1561 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1562 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1565 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1569 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1570 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1571 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1573 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1574 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1576 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1577 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1578 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1579 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1580 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1582 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1583 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1584 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1585 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1586 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1587 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1588 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1589 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1591 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1592 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1594 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1595 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1597 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1598 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1600 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1601 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1602 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1604 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1605 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1606 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1607 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1609 ** Changes in behavior
1611 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1612 when -v or -c specified.
1614 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1615 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1619 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1620 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1621 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1622 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1623 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1625 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1626 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1627 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1629 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1630 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1631 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1632 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1633 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1634 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1635 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1637 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1638 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1639 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1643 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1644 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1646 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1649 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1650 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1652 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1653 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1655 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1656 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1658 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1660 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1664 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1665 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1667 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1670 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1674 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1675 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1677 ** Changes in behavior
1679 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1680 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1681 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1682 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1683 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1684 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1685 resolved for 2.6.39.
1686 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1687 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1688 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1692 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1695 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1699 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1700 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1701 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1703 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1704 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1705 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1707 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1708 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1709 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1711 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1712 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1714 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1715 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1717 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1718 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1720 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1721 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1725 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1726 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1727 processed portion thereof.
1729 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1730 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1732 ** Changes in behavior
1734 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1735 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1736 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1738 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1739 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1740 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1742 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1743 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1745 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1746 Use --preserve-context instead.
1748 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1751 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1755 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1756 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1757 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1758 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1759 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1761 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1762 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1764 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1765 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1766 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1768 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1769 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1771 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1772 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1776 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1777 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1778 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1779 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1780 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1781 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1782 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1783 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1785 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1786 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1787 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1789 ** Changes in behavior
1791 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1792 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1793 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1796 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1800 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1801 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1802 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1805 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1809 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1810 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1812 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1813 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1815 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1816 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1818 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1819 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1820 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1821 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1823 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1824 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1826 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1827 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1828 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1830 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1832 ** Changes in behavior
1834 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1835 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1836 to the number of available processors.
1840 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
1841 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
1842 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
1845 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1849 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1850 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1851 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1852 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1854 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1855 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1856 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1858 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1859 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1861 ** Changes in behavior
1863 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1864 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1866 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1867 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1868 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1869 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1870 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1871 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1873 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1874 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1875 the same way as the others.
1877 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1878 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1881 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1885 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1886 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1887 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1889 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1890 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1892 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1893 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1894 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1896 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1897 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1899 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1900 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1902 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1903 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1904 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1906 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1907 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1908 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1909 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1913 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1914 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1916 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1919 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1920 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1922 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1924 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1925 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1926 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1928 ** Changes in behavior
1930 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1931 rather than its aliased target.
1933 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1934 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1935 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1937 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1938 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1939 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1940 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1941 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1942 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1943 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1944 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1946 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1948 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1950 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1951 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1954 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1955 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1956 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1957 control like taskset for example.
1959 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1961 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1962 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1963 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1964 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1965 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1966 includes %C when context information is available.
1968 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1969 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1970 rather than a file system attribute.
1972 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1973 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1974 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1975 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1977 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1978 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1979 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1981 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1982 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1983 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1986 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1990 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1991 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1993 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1995 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1996 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1998 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1999 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2000 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2001 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2003 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2004 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2005 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2009 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2010 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2012 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2013 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2014 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2016 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2017 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2018 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2019 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2020 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2021 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2022 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2023 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2024 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2026 ** Changes in behavior
2028 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2029 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2031 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2032 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2035 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2039 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2040 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2041 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2042 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2046 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2047 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2049 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2050 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2051 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2052 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2054 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2055 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2056 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2059 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2063 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2064 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2065 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2067 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2068 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2069 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2071 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2072 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2074 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2075 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2076 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2077 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2079 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2080 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2081 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2083 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2084 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2085 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2086 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2088 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2089 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2090 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2092 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2093 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2094 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2095 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2097 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2098 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2099 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2101 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2102 processes will not intersperse their output.
2103 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2106 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2110 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2111 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2113 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2114 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2116 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2117 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2118 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2119 the presence of the empty string argument.
2120 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2122 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2123 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2124 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2125 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2127 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2128 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2130 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2131 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2132 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2134 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2135 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2136 and with a malicious user on the same system
2137 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2138 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2141 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2145 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2146 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2149 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2150 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2151 offending directory and all "contents."
2153 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2154 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2155 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2157 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2158 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2159 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2161 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2162 processes will not intersperse their output.
2163 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2164 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2166 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2167 output the name of the file to stdout.
2168 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2170 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2171 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2172 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2174 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2175 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2178 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2179 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2180 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2182 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2183 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2184 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2185 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2186 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2187 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2189 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2190 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2191 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2192 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2194 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2195 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2197 ** Changes in behavior
2199 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2200 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2201 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2202 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2203 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2205 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2206 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2207 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2208 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2210 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2212 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2213 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2214 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2215 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2216 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2220 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2224 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2225 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2227 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2228 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2230 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2231 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2232 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2234 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2235 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2238 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2242 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2243 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2244 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2246 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2247 to accommodate leap seconds.
2248 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2250 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2251 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2252 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2254 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2256 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2257 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2258 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2260 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2261 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2262 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2263 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2264 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2268 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2269 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2270 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2271 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2273 ** Changes in behavior
2275 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2276 environment variable is set.
2278 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2279 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2280 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2284 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2285 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2286 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2287 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2289 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2290 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2291 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2292 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2296 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2297 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2298 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2300 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2301 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2302 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2303 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2304 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2305 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2306 another improvement:
2308 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2309 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2312 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2316 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2317 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2318 and libraries tested at configure time.
2319 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2321 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2322 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2324 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2325 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2327 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2328 printing a summary to stderr.
2329 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2331 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2332 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2333 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2335 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2336 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2338 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2339 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2340 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2341 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2343 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2344 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2345 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2346 which is relatively unusual.
2347 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2349 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2350 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2351 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2352 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2353 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2354 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2355 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2359 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2360 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2361 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2362 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2363 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2367 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2368 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2370 ** Changes in behavior
2372 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2373 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2374 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2375 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2376 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2379 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2383 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2384 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2386 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2387 before data copying has started.
2389 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2390 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2392 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2393 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2394 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2395 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2397 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2398 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2399 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2400 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2402 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2407 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2408 for its standard streams.
2410 ** Changes in behavior
2412 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2413 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2414 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2415 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2416 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2417 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2419 ** Deprecated options
2421 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2422 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2426 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2428 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2429 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2430 a btrfs file system.
2432 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2434 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2435 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2437 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2438 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2441 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2445 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2446 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2447 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2448 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2450 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2451 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2452 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2453 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2454 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2459 make check: two tests have been corrected
2463 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2464 inherited from gnulib.
2467 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2471 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2472 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2473 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2474 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2476 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2477 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2479 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2481 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2482 systems without xattr support.
2484 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2485 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2486 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2488 ** Changes in behavior
2490 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2491 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2492 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2493 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2495 ** Improved robustness
2497 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2498 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2499 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2500 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2501 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2502 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2503 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2504 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2505 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2509 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2510 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2512 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2513 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2514 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2515 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2516 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2519 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2523 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2524 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2525 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2529 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2530 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2531 data was read, or on process exit.
2532 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2534 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2535 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2536 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2537 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2539 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2540 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2541 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2542 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2544 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2545 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2547 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2548 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2550 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2551 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2552 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2554 ** Changes in behavior
2556 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2557 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2558 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2560 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2561 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2563 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2564 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2565 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2568 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2572 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2574 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2575 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2576 install: Never copies xattrs
2578 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2579 from overwriting any existing destination file
2581 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2582 mode where this feature is available.
2584 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2585 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2586 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2587 do not modify the destination at all.
2589 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2591 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2595 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2596 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2598 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2600 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2601 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2603 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2604 processing the first file name
2606 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2607 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2608 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2609 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2611 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2612 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2614 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2615 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2618 ** Changes in behavior
2620 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2621 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2623 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2624 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2625 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2627 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2628 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2630 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2632 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2633 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2634 is still marked with a '+'.
2637 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2641 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2642 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2646 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2647 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2648 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2649 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2650 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2651 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2653 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2654 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2656 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2657 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2659 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2661 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2662 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2663 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2665 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2666 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2668 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2669 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2670 used to factor large numbers.
2672 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2675 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2677 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2679 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2680 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2682 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2683 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2684 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2685 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2687 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2688 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2689 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2691 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2692 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2696 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2698 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2699 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2701 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2702 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2704 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2706 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2707 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2711 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2712 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2713 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2715 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2717 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2718 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2719 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2721 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2722 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2723 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2725 ** Changes in behavior
2727 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2728 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2731 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2735 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2736 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2737 'futimens' system calls.
2741 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2743 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2744 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2745 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2747 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2748 with no USERNAME argument.
2750 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2751 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2752 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2754 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2755 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2756 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2757 number of fields for some inputs.
2759 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2760 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2762 ** Changes in behavior
2764 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2765 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2768 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2772 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2774 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2775 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2776 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2777 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2779 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2780 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2782 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2783 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2785 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2786 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2788 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2789 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2790 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2791 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2793 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2794 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2795 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2796 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2797 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2798 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2800 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2801 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2803 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2804 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2805 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2807 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2808 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2810 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2811 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2813 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2814 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2815 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2816 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2818 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2819 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2821 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2822 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2824 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2825 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2826 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2830 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2831 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2833 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2834 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2835 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2836 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2840 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2841 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2843 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2845 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2849 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2850 which have negative errno values.
2854 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2858 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2862 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2863 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2866 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2870 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2871 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2872 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2874 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2875 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2876 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2877 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2881 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2882 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2883 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2884 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2887 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2891 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2893 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2894 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2895 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2898 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2902 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2903 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2905 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2907 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2909 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2911 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2915 ** Changes in behavior
2917 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2918 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2920 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2921 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2923 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2924 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2925 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2929 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2930 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2931 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2932 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2933 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2934 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2935 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2936 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2937 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2938 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2939 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2941 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2942 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2943 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2946 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2949 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2950 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2951 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2953 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2954 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2955 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2958 ** New build options
2960 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2961 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2962 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2963 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2965 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2966 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2967 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2968 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2969 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2970 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2971 of "make check" fail.
2973 ** Remove deprecated options
2975 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2976 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2977 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2978 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2979 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2981 ** Improved robustness
2983 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2984 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2985 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2986 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2987 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2988 loss of the contents of a/f.
2990 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2991 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2995 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2996 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2997 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2999 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3000 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3001 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3002 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3004 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3005 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3006 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3007 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3008 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3009 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3010 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3011 destination is a symlink.
3013 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3015 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3016 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3018 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3019 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3021 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3023 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3024 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3026 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3027 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3029 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3032 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3033 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3035 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3036 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3038 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3039 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3040 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3041 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3043 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3044 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3045 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3047 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3048 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3049 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3051 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3052 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3053 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3054 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3056 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3057 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3058 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3060 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3061 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3063 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3064 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3066 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3068 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3069 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3070 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3072 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3073 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3075 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3076 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3078 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3079 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3081 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3082 [present in the original version]
3085 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3089 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3091 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3092 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3093 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3095 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3096 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3098 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3102 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3103 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3105 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3106 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3108 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3109 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3111 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3112 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3113 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3114 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3115 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3116 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3118 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3119 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3122 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3123 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3125 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3128 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3129 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3130 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3132 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3133 directory is unreadable.
3135 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3136 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3137 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3139 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3140 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3141 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3142 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3143 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3146 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3147 Before it would print nothing.
3149 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3151 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3152 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3153 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3154 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3155 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3156 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3157 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3158 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3160 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3164 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3165 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3166 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3168 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3169 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3170 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3171 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3174 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3178 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3179 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3180 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3181 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3182 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3183 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3184 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3186 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3187 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3188 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3189 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3190 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3191 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3192 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3193 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3195 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3196 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3197 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3200 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3204 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3205 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3207 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3208 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3209 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3211 ** Improved robustness
3213 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3214 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3215 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3218 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3222 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3223 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3224 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3225 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3226 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3228 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3232 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3235 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3239 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3240 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3241 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3242 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3244 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3245 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3247 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3248 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3249 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3252 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3254 ** Improved robustness
3256 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3257 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3259 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3260 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3261 or NFS-mounted partition.
3263 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3264 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3268 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3269 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3270 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3271 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3272 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3273 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3275 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3276 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3278 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3279 or neglect to report file removal.
3281 For the "groups" command:
3283 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3284 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3286 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3288 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3290 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3294 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3295 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3298 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3300 ** Changes in behavior
3302 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3303 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3304 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3305 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3307 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3308 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3309 a final './' or '../' component.
3311 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3312 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3313 this only for pipes.
3315 ** Infrastructure changes
3317 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3318 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3319 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3320 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3324 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3325 name is "." or "..".
3327 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3328 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3329 dirent.d_type support.
3331 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3332 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3334 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3335 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3336 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3337 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3340 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3342 ** Changes in behavior
3344 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3348 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3349 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3353 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3354 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3355 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3357 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3358 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3360 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3361 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3363 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3365 ** Improved robustness
3367 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3368 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3369 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3371 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3372 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3375 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3376 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3378 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3379 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3381 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3382 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3384 ** Changes in behavior
3386 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3387 where the two are distinct.
3389 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3390 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3391 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3392 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3393 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3394 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3395 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3396 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3397 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3398 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3399 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3400 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3401 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3402 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3403 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3404 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3405 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3407 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3408 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3409 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3411 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3412 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3413 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3414 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3417 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3418 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3422 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3423 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3424 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3425 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3427 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3428 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3429 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3431 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3432 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3433 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3434 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3435 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3438 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3439 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3441 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3442 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3443 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3444 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3446 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3447 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3448 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3450 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3451 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3452 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3453 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3455 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3456 and sticky) with the -m option.
3458 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3459 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3460 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3461 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3462 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3464 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3465 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3467 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3471 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3472 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3473 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3474 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3476 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3478 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3480 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3481 silently ignoring one of them.
3483 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3484 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3485 containing this change was 5.92.
3487 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3488 automatically newline terminated.
3490 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3491 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3492 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3493 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3496 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3497 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3498 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3501 ** Scheduled for removal
3503 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3504 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3506 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3507 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3508 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3509 command to unlink a directory.
3511 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3512 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3513 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3514 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3518 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3519 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3520 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3521 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3522 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3523 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3527 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3528 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3530 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3532 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3533 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3534 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3536 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3537 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3540 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3541 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3543 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3544 list directories before files.
3546 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3547 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3548 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3549 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3552 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3554 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3556 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3557 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3558 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3560 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3561 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3565 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3566 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3567 usually printing nothing.
3569 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3571 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3572 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3573 them with hard-linked directories.
3575 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3576 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3577 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3579 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3580 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3581 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3583 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3586 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3587 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3589 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3590 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3592 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3593 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3595 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3596 all command-line arguments.
3598 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3600 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3602 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3603 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3605 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3607 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3608 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3609 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3610 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3611 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3613 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3614 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3616 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3617 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3618 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3619 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3621 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3623 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3627 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3628 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3630 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3631 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3633 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3634 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3636 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3637 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3639 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3640 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3642 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3644 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3645 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3646 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3649 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3651 ** Build-related bug fixes
3653 installing .mo files would fail
3656 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3660 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3662 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3665 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3669 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3670 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3674 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3676 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3677 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3679 ** Deprecated options
3681 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3682 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3684 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3688 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3690 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3691 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3692 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3693 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3695 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3698 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3704 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3709 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3711 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3713 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3714 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3715 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3717 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3718 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3719 problematic usages. These include:
3721 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3722 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3723 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3724 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3725 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3726 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3727 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3728 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3729 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3731 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3732 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3734 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3735 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3736 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3737 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3739 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3740 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3741 between binary and text files.
3743 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3747 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3751 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3752 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3754 head tac tail tee tr
3755 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3757 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3758 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3760 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3761 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3762 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3764 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3766 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3768 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3769 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3770 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3774 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3776 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3777 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3779 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3780 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3781 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3785 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3786 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3790 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3791 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3792 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3796 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3797 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3801 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3803 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3805 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3809 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3810 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3811 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3813 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3814 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3815 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
3816 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3817 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
3819 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3823 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3824 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3825 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3827 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3829 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3830 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3831 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3832 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3834 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3836 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3837 rather than silently wrapping around.
3839 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3840 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3842 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3843 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3845 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3846 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3847 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3848 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3850 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3852 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3854 ** Improved robustness
3856 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3857 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3858 no matter how large the result.
3860 ** Improved portability
3862 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3863 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3865 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3867 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3868 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3869 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3871 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3872 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3876 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3877 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3879 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3881 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3882 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3883 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3884 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3886 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3887 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3889 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3890 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3891 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3893 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3895 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3896 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3898 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3899 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3901 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3903 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3904 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3906 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3907 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3909 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3910 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3911 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3913 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3915 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3917 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3921 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3923 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3924 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3925 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3927 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3928 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3930 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3931 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3932 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3934 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3935 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3937 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3938 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3939 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3940 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3942 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3943 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3945 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3946 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3947 the file system does not support it.
3949 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3951 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3952 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3954 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3956 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3957 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3959 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3960 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3961 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3962 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3964 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3965 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3968 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3969 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3970 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3971 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3973 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3974 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3975 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3976 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3978 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3979 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3981 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3983 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3984 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3985 reporting incorrect results.
3989 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3990 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3992 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3995 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3997 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3998 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4000 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4001 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4003 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4006 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4007 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4008 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4009 the file name does not look like a page range.
4011 printf has several changes:
4013 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4014 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4016 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4017 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4018 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4020 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4021 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4024 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4025 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4027 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4028 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4030 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4032 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4033 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4035 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4037 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4039 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4040 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4041 when first encountering the directory.
4045 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4046 output; POSIX requires this.
4048 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4049 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4051 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4053 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4054 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4056 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4057 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4059 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4060 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4061 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4062 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4063 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4064 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4065 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4067 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4068 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4069 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4071 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4072 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4074 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4076 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4078 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4079 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4080 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4081 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4083 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4087 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4088 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4089 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4090 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4091 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4093 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4094 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4095 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4097 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4098 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4100 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4101 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4103 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4104 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4105 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4106 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4107 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4109 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4110 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4112 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4113 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4115 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4117 nocreat do not create the output file
4118 excl fail if the output file already exists
4119 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4120 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4122 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4124 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4125 direct use direct I/O for data
4126 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4127 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4128 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4129 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4130 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4132 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4134 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4135 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4138 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4139 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4140 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4141 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4142 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4143 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4145 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4146 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4148 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4151 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4153 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4155 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4156 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4158 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4159 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4160 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4162 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4163 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4164 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4166 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4168 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4169 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4171 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4172 for compatibility with bash.
4174 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4176 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4177 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4178 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4179 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4181 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4182 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4184 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4185 ls supports TABSIZE.
4186 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4187 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4188 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4190 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4193 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4195 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4196 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4197 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4198 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4199 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4200 an offset, not as a file name.
4202 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4203 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4205 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4206 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4208 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4209 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4211 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4212 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4213 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4215 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4216 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4218 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4219 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4223 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4225 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4227 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4231 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4232 or more arguments between partitions.
4234 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4235 holes in the destination.
4237 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4238 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4239 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4240 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4241 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4242 terminates immediately.
4244 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4246 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4248 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4249 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4250 not the empty string.
4252 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4253 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4257 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4258 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4259 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4262 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4269 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4273 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4274 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4276 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4277 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4279 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4280 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4281 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4284 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4288 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4289 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4291 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4292 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4294 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4295 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4296 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4298 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4300 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4303 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4305 ** Configuration option
4307 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4308 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4312 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4313 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4317 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4318 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4319 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4322 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4323 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4324 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4325 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4326 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4327 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4328 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4331 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4335 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4336 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4337 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4339 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4340 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4342 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4344 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4345 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4346 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4347 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4349 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4351 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4352 not just the ones that reference directories
4354 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4355 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4357 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4358 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4359 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4361 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4362 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4363 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4364 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4365 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4366 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4368 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4373 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4374 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4376 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4378 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4380 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4382 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4383 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4385 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4386 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4388 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4390 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4394 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4396 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4398 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4399 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4400 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4401 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4402 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4404 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4405 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4407 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4408 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4410 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4411 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4413 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4414 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4415 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4419 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4420 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4421 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4422 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4423 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4424 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4425 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4426 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4427 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4428 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4429 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4430 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4431 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4432 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4434 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4436 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4437 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4439 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4441 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4443 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4444 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4446 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4448 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4449 without a trailing newline.
4451 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4452 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4454 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4457 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4461 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4463 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4465 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4466 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4467 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4468 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4470 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4472 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4473 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4474 be printed without leading spaces.
4476 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4477 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4482 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4483 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4484 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4486 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4488 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4489 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4491 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4492 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4494 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4495 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4497 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4499 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4501 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4503 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4504 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4506 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4508 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4510 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4511 byte offsets are specified.
4514 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4517 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4520 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4521 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4522 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4523 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4524 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4525 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4526 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4527 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4528 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4529 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4530 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4531 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4532 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4533 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4534 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4535 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4536 directory where M has write access.
4537 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4538 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4539 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4542 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4543 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4544 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4545 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4546 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4547 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4548 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4549 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4550 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4551 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4552 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4553 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4554 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4555 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4556 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4557 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4558 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4559 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4560 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4561 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4562 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4563 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4564 appeared one additional time.
4566 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4567 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4568 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4569 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4572 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4573 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4574 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4575 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4576 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4577 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4578 if there were more than 338.
4580 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4581 - false --help now exits nonzero
4584 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4585 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4586 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4587 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4590 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4591 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4592 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4593 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4594 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4597 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4598 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4599 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4600 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4601 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4602 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4603 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4606 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4607 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4608 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4609 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4610 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4611 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4613 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4614 under certain unusual conditions
4615 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4616 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4619 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4620 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4621 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4622 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4623 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4624 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4625 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4626 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4627 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4628 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4629 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4630 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4631 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4632 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4633 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4634 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4637 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4638 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4641 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4642 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4643 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4644 involving hard-linked directories
4645 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4646 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4647 character-special and block files
4650 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4651 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4652 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4653 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4654 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4655 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4656 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4657 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4658 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4660 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4661 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4662 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4663 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4664 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4665 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4666 specified on the command line.
4667 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4668 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4669 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4670 the first file untouched.
4671 * readlink: new program
4672 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4673 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4674 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4675 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4676 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4677 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4680 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4681 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4682 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4683 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4684 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4685 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4686 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4687 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4688 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4689 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4690 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4691 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4693 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4694 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4695 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4697 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4698 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4699 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4700 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4701 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4702 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4703 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4704 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4707 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4708 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4711 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4712 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4713 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4714 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4715 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4716 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4717 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4720 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4721 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4723 ========================================================================
4724 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4725 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4728 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4730 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4731 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4732 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4733 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4734 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4735 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4736 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4737 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4738 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4739 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4740 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4741 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4743 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4744 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4745 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4746 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4748 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4751 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4753 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4754 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4755 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4756 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4757 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4758 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4759 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4762 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4763 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4764 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4765 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4766 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4767 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4768 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4769 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4770 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4771 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4772 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4773 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4774 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4775 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4776 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4777 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4779 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4780 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4782 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4783 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4784 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4785 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4786 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4787 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4789 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4790 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4791 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4792 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4793 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4794 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4795 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4797 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4798 the source files in the following example:
4799 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4800 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4801 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4802 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4803 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4804 links between source files with --preserve=links
4805 * cp accepts new options:
4806 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4807 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4808 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4809 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4810 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4811 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4812 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4813 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4814 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4816 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4817 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4818 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4819 even though it's older than dest.
4820 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4821 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4822 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4823 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4824 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4826 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4827 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4828 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4829 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4830 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4831 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4832 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4834 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4835 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4836 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4838 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4839 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4840 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4841 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4842 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4843 This is the default.
4845 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4846 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4847 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4848 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4849 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4851 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4854 ========================================================================
4855 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4856 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4859 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4860 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4862 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4863 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4864 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4865 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4866 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4868 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4869 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4870 that specifies a non-directory
4873 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4874 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4875 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4876 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4877 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4878 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4879 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4880 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4881 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4882 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4883 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4884 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4885 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4886 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4887 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4888 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4889 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4890 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4891 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4892 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4893 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4894 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4895 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4896 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4898 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4899 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4900 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4902 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4904 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4905 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4907 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4908 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4909 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4910 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4911 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4913 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4914 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4915 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4916 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4917 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4919 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4921 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4922 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4923 * still more portability fixes
4924 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4925 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4927 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4929 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4931 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4933 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4934 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4935 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4936 there is any time remaining
4937 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4939 ========================================================================
4940 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4941 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4943 This package began as the union of the following:
4944 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4946 ========================================================================
4948 Copyright (C) 2001-2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4950 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4951 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4952 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4953 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4954 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4955 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.