1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
8 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
9 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
11 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
12 presented with malformed checksum lines.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
15 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
16 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
19 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
22 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
23 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
26 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
27 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
29 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
30 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
31 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
33 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
34 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
35 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
37 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
38 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
40 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
41 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
44 ** Changes in behavior
46 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
47 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
48 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
52 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
53 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
54 reinstating that behaviour from coreutils-9.0.
56 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
57 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
60 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
64 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
65 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
66 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
67 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
68 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
70 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
71 Previousy it may have issued "File exists" errors when
72 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
73 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
75 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
76 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
77 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
79 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
80 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
81 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
82 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
84 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
85 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
87 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
88 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
89 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
91 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
92 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
93 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
94 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
96 ** Changes in behavior
98 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
99 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
100 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
101 due to -n, -i, or -u.
105 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
106 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
107 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
110 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
114 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
115 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
116 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
117 total line in this case.
118 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
120 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
121 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
122 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
124 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
125 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
127 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
128 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
129 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
130 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
132 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
133 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
134 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
135 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
136 which may have resulted in data corruption.
137 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
139 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
140 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
141 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
143 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
144 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
146 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
147 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
148 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
150 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
151 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
152 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
154 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
155 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
156 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
158 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
159 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
160 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
161 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
162 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
164 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
165 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
166 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
167 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
168 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
170 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
171 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
174 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
175 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
176 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
178 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
179 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
180 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
181 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
183 ** Changes in behavior
185 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
186 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
187 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
188 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
189 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
190 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
192 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
193 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
195 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
196 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
197 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
198 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
200 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
201 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
202 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
204 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
205 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
206 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
207 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
209 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
210 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
211 This behavior is now documented.
213 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
214 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
216 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
217 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
218 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
220 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
221 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
222 from errors from the invoked command.
224 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
225 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
226 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
229 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
233 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
234 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
236 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
237 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
239 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
240 print details on how a file is being copied.
242 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
243 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
245 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
246 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
248 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
249 asked to move a file to a different file system.
251 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
252 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
254 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
255 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
257 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
258 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
262 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
263 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
264 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
265 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
266 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
268 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
269 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
271 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
272 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
274 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
275 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
276 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
278 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
279 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
280 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
282 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
283 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
285 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
286 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
287 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
288 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
291 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
295 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
296 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
297 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
299 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
300 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
301 before adjusting it to the correct value.
302 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
304 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
305 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
306 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
308 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
309 and B is in some other file system.
310 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
312 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
313 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
314 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
316 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
317 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
319 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
320 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
321 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
322 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
325 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
326 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
327 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
329 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
330 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
331 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
333 ** Changes in behavior
335 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
336 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
337 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
339 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
340 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
341 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
342 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
344 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
345 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
347 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
348 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
349 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
351 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
352 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
354 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
355 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
356 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
357 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
358 though they still work.
360 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
361 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
362 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
364 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
365 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
367 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
368 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
369 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
371 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
372 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
373 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
374 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
378 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
379 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
381 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
382 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
384 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
385 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
389 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
390 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
392 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
393 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
394 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
397 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
399 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
400 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
401 since synchronizing can take a long time.
403 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
405 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
406 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
408 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
410 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
411 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
412 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
416 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
417 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
420 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
424 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
427 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
428 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
429 is a non regular file.
430 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
432 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
433 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
434 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
436 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
437 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
439 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
440 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
442 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
443 heavily changed during the run.
444 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
446 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
447 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
449 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
450 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
452 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
455 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
458 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
459 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
460 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
462 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
463 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
465 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
466 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
468 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
469 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
470 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
472 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
473 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
476 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
477 invalid combinations of case character classes.
478 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
480 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
481 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
482 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
484 ** Changes in behavior
486 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
487 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
489 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
490 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
491 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
493 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
494 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
495 that was made in release 8.32.
497 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
498 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
499 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
501 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
502 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
504 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
505 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
509 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
510 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
511 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
512 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
514 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
516 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
517 when verifying tagged format checksums.
519 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
521 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
522 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
524 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
525 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
527 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
528 NUL instead of newline.
530 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
532 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
533 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
534 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
538 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
539 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
541 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
542 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
543 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
545 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
546 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
548 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
549 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
551 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
552 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
554 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
555 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
556 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
558 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
560 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
561 where avx2 instructions are supported.
562 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
565 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
569 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
570 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
571 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
573 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
574 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
575 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
576 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
577 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
579 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
580 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
581 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
582 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
583 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
584 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
586 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
589 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
590 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
591 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
594 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
595 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
596 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
597 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
599 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
600 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
602 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
603 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
604 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
605 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
607 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
608 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
609 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
611 ** Changes in behavior
613 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
614 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
615 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
616 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
617 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
620 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
621 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
622 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
623 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
624 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
625 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
626 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
627 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
630 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
631 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
632 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
633 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
635 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
636 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
637 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
639 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
640 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
644 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
645 file creation time, where available.
647 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
648 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
650 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
651 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
652 useful on network file systems.
656 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
657 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
659 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
660 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
661 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
665 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
668 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
672 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
673 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
675 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
676 after asking the user whether to proceed.
677 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
679 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
680 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
682 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
683 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
684 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
686 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
687 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
688 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
689 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
690 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
691 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
693 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
694 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
696 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
697 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
699 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
700 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
703 ** Changes in behavior
705 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
706 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
707 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
708 end-of-options marker.
710 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
713 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
714 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
716 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
717 environment variable is set.
719 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
720 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
721 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
722 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
723 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
725 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
727 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
728 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
729 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
730 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
732 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
733 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
737 id now supports specifying multiple users.
739 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
740 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
742 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
743 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
744 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
745 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
746 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
747 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
749 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
750 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
752 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
753 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
755 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
756 signal handling before executing a program.
760 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
761 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
762 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
766 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
767 which is common in Asian locales.
769 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
770 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
772 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
773 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
776 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
780 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
781 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
782 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
783 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
784 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
785 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
787 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
788 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
789 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
790 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
792 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
793 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
794 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
795 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
796 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
797 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
799 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
800 even if it can't be traversed.
801 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
803 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
804 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
805 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
807 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
808 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
810 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
811 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
812 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
813 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
814 now silently does nothing if A exists.
815 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
817 ** Changes in behavior
819 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
820 it is self referential.
822 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
826 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
828 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
829 each processing step.
831 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
832 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
835 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
836 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
837 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
839 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
840 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
844 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
845 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
847 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
848 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
849 and tail -f uses inotify.
851 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
852 which is especially significant on macOS.
855 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
859 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
860 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
862 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
863 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
864 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
865 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
867 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
868 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
870 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
871 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
873 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
874 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
875 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
877 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
878 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
880 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
881 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
882 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
884 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
885 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
886 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
887 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
888 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
892 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
896 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
898 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
899 rather than reading from the start.
901 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
902 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
903 for unknown long options.
907 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
908 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
911 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
915 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
916 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
917 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
918 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
920 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
921 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
922 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
923 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
924 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
926 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
927 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
928 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
929 now fails instead of losing the data.
930 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
932 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
933 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
934 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
936 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
937 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
938 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
940 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
941 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
942 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
944 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
945 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
946 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
948 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
949 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
950 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
952 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
953 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
954 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
956 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
957 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
958 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
960 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
961 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
962 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
964 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
965 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
967 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
968 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
969 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
971 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
972 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
974 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
975 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
976 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
977 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
979 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
980 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
981 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
983 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
984 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
985 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
987 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
988 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
992 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
993 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
994 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
996 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
997 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
999 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1000 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1002 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1003 executing the subsidiary program.
1005 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1007 ** Changes in behavior
1009 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1010 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1011 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1012 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1016 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1018 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1019 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1021 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1022 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1023 is effective in this case.
1026 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1030 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1031 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
1032 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1034 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1035 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1036 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1038 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1039 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1040 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1042 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1043 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1046 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1047 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1048 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1050 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1051 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1052 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1053 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1054 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1056 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1057 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1058 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1059 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1063 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1064 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1065 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1066 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1068 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1069 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1070 time zone is indeterminate.
1072 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1073 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1074 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1075 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1077 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1078 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1079 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1081 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1082 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1084 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1085 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1086 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1090 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1091 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1092 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1095 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1099 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1100 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1103 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1104 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1105 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1107 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1108 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1109 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1110 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1111 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1113 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1114 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1115 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1117 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1118 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1120 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1121 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1122 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1124 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1125 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1126 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1128 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1129 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1131 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1132 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1133 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1135 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1136 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1138 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1139 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1140 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1142 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1144 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1145 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1147 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1148 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1150 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1151 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1153 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1154 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1156 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1157 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1158 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1159 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1161 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1162 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1163 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1165 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1166 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1167 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1169 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1170 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1171 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1173 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1174 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1175 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1177 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1178 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1180 ** Changes in behavior
1182 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1184 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1185 values for any argument.
1187 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1188 they are out of localtime range.
1190 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1191 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1192 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1193 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1197 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1198 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1199 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1201 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1202 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1204 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1205 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1207 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1209 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1210 written to a terminal.
1212 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1213 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1215 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1216 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1217 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1218 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1219 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1220 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1221 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1222 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1223 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1224 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1225 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1227 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1228 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1232 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1233 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1237 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1239 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1240 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1242 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1245 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1249 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1250 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1251 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1252 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1254 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1255 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1257 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1258 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1259 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1261 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1262 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1264 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1265 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1268 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1269 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1271 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1272 that specify an offset for the first field.
1273 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1275 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1276 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1280 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1281 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1285 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1286 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1288 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1289 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1290 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1291 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1292 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1294 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1295 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1296 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1298 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1299 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1300 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1302 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1303 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1305 ** Changes in behavior
1307 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1308 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1310 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1311 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1313 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1314 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1316 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1317 when outputting to a terminal.
1319 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1323 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1324 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1326 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1327 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1329 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1330 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1331 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1333 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1334 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1336 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1337 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1338 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1340 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1342 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1343 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1344 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1346 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1347 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1350 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1354 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1355 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1357 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1358 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1360 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1361 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1364 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1365 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1366 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1367 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1369 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1370 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1371 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1372 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1374 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1375 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1377 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1378 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1380 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1381 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1382 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1384 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1385 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1386 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1388 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1389 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1390 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1392 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1393 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1394 character at the 4GiB position.
1395 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1397 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1398 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1400 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1401 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1403 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1404 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1405 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1407 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1408 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1410 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1411 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1412 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1414 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1415 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1417 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1418 when those files are being created or renamed.
1419 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1423 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1424 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1425 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1426 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1428 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1429 on stderr approximately every second.
1431 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1432 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1434 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1435 other than the default newline character.
1437 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1438 a useful setting with high latency links.
1440 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1441 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1443 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1444 and output errors in general.
1446 ** Changes in behavior
1448 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1449 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1450 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1451 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1453 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1454 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1455 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1456 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1457 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1459 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1460 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1462 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1464 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1465 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1467 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1468 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1472 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1473 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1475 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1476 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1478 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1479 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1481 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1482 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1484 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1486 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1487 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1488 documentation are provided.
1491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1495 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1496 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1498 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1499 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1500 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1503 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1504 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1505 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1506 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1508 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1509 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1511 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1512 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1514 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1515 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1516 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1517 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1518 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1519 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1520 values are in octal.
1533 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1535 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1536 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1537 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1538 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1539 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1540 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1542 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1543 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1544 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1545 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1547 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1548 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1549 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1551 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1552 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1553 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1554 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1556 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1557 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1558 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1560 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1561 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1562 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1564 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1565 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1566 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1567 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1568 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1570 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1571 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1572 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1574 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1575 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1577 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1578 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1579 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1581 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1582 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1584 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1585 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1587 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1588 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1590 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1591 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1593 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1594 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1595 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1597 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1598 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1602 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1603 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1605 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1606 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1607 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1608 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1609 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1610 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1611 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1612 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1613 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1614 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1615 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1616 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1617 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1618 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1619 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1620 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1621 it suitable for embedded system.
1623 ** Changes in behavior
1625 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1626 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1628 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1629 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1631 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1632 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1633 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1635 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1636 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1637 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1641 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1642 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1643 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1645 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1647 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1648 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1649 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1651 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1652 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1653 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1654 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1656 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1657 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1659 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1660 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1661 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1664 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1668 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1669 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1670 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1672 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1673 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1674 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1675 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1677 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1678 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1679 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1681 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1682 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1684 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1686 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1687 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1688 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1690 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1691 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1692 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1694 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1695 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1696 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1697 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1699 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1700 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1701 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1703 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1704 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1705 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1707 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1708 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1710 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1711 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1712 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1713 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1715 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1716 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1717 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1719 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1720 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1721 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1725 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1726 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1727 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1729 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1730 used to identify the split points.
1732 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1733 command line argument through to the output.
1735 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1738 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1739 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1741 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1742 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1744 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1746 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1747 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1748 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1750 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1751 unique groups with empty lines.
1753 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1754 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1756 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1759 ** Changes in behavior
1761 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1762 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1763 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1764 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1766 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1767 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1769 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1770 not just the transfer counts.
1772 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1774 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1775 as per the documented interface.
1779 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1781 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1782 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1783 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1784 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1786 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1787 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1788 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1789 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1791 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1792 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1793 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1795 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1796 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1798 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1799 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1801 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1805 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1808 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1812 numfmt: reformat numbers
1816 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1817 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1818 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1820 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1821 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1822 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1824 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1825 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1829 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1830 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1832 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1833 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1834 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1836 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1837 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1838 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1840 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1841 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1842 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1844 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1845 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1846 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1848 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1849 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1850 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1852 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1853 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1855 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1856 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1858 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1859 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1860 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1862 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1863 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1864 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1866 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1867 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1868 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1870 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1871 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1872 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1873 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1875 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1876 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1877 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1879 ** Changes in behavior
1881 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1882 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1883 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1884 'total' in the target column.
1886 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1887 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1888 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1890 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1891 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1893 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1894 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1898 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1899 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1901 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1902 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1904 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1908 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1909 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1910 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1911 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1912 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1913 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1914 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1915 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1916 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1917 for a patched distribution package.
1919 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1920 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1922 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1923 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1924 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1925 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1928 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1932 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1934 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1935 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1936 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1940 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1941 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1942 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1943 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1944 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1946 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1947 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1949 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1950 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1951 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1952 eventually exits nonzero.
1954 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1955 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1956 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1957 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1958 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1960 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1961 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1962 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1964 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1965 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1966 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1968 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1969 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1970 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1972 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1973 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1974 Before, this would infloop:
1975 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1976 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1978 ** Changes in behavior
1980 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1984 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1985 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1986 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1987 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1988 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1991 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1992 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1993 format-changing options.
1995 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1996 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1997 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1998 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1999 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2003 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2004 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2005 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2006 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2007 are run without following the instructions in README.
2009 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2010 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2011 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2012 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2013 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2014 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2015 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2018 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2022 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2023 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2024 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2025 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2027 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2028 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2029 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2030 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2032 sort -u could read freed memory.
2033 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2034 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2035 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2039 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2040 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2041 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2042 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2045 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2049 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2050 processes will not intersperse their output.
2051 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2053 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2054 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2055 date: invalid date '\260'
2056 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2058 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2059 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2060 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2061 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2063 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2064 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2065 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2067 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2068 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2069 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2070 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2071 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2072 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2074 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2075 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2077 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2078 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2080 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2081 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2082 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2084 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2085 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2086 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2090 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2092 ** Changes in behavior
2094 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2095 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2096 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2097 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2098 have any reason to include it here.
2102 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2103 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2104 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2106 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2107 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2108 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2111 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2115 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2116 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2117 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2118 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2119 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2120 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2122 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2123 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2124 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2125 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2126 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2127 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2128 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2130 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2131 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2133 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2134 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2138 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2139 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2141 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2143 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2145 ** Changes in behavior
2147 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2148 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2149 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2151 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2152 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2155 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2159 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2160 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2161 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2162 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2163 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2164 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2165 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2166 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2168 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2169 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2170 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2171 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2172 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2174 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2175 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2177 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2178 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2180 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2181 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2183 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2184 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2186 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2187 additional static suffix to output file names.
2189 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2190 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2191 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2193 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2194 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2198 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2199 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2200 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2202 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2203 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2204 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2205 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2206 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2207 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2209 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2210 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2211 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2212 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2213 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2215 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2216 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2217 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2218 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2222 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2223 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2224 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2226 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2227 instead of causing a usage failure.
2229 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2232 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2236 realpath: print resolved file names.
2240 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2241 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2243 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2244 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2246 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2247 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2248 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2249 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2250 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2251 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2253 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2254 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2255 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2257 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2258 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2259 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2261 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2262 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2263 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2264 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2265 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2267 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2269 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2270 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2272 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2273 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2274 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2276 ** Changes in behavior
2278 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2279 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2280 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2281 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2282 usually-short referent instead.
2284 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2285 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2286 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2287 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2290 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2294 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2295 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2296 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2298 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2299 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2301 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2302 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2306 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2307 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2309 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2310 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2311 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2312 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2314 ** Changes in behavior
2316 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2317 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2318 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2322 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2323 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2324 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2327 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2331 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2332 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2333 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2335 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2336 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2338 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2339 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2340 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2341 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2342 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2344 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2345 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2346 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2347 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2348 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2349 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2350 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2351 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2353 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2354 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2356 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2357 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2359 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2362 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2363 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2364 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2366 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2367 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2368 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2369 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2371 ** Changes in behavior
2373 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2374 when -v or -c specified.
2376 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2377 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2381 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2382 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2383 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2384 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2385 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2387 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2388 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2389 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2391 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2392 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2393 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2394 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2395 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2396 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2397 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2399 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2400 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2401 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2405 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2406 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2408 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2411 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2412 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2414 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2415 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2417 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2418 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2420 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2422 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2426 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2427 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2429 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2432 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2436 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2437 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2439 ** Changes in behavior
2441 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2442 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2443 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2444 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2445 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2446 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2447 resolved for 2.6.39.
2448 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2449 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2450 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2454 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2457 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2461 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2462 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2463 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2465 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2466 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2467 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2469 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2470 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2471 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2473 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2474 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2476 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2477 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2479 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2480 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2482 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2483 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2487 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2488 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2489 processed portion thereof.
2491 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2492 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2494 ** Changes in behavior
2496 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2497 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2498 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2500 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2501 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2502 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2504 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2505 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2507 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2508 Use --preserve-context instead.
2510 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2513 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2517 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2518 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2519 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2520 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2521 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2523 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2524 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2526 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2527 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2528 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2530 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2531 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2533 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2534 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2538 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2539 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2540 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2541 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2542 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2543 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2544 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2545 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2547 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2548 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2549 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2551 ** Changes in behavior
2553 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2554 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2555 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2558 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2562 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2563 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2564 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2567 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2571 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2572 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2574 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2575 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2577 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2578 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2580 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2581 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2582 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2585 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2586 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2588 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2589 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2590 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2592 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2594 ** Changes in behavior
2596 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2597 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2598 to the number of available processors.
2602 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2603 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2604 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2607 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2611 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2612 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2613 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2614 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2616 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2617 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2618 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2620 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2621 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2623 ** Changes in behavior
2625 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2626 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2628 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2629 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2630 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2631 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2632 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2633 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2635 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2636 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2637 the same way as the others.
2639 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2640 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2643 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2647 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2648 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2649 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2651 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2652 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2654 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2655 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2656 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2658 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2659 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2661 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2662 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2664 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2665 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2666 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2668 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2669 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2670 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2671 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2675 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2676 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2678 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2681 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2682 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2684 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2686 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2687 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2688 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2690 ** Changes in behavior
2692 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2693 rather than its aliased target.
2695 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2696 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2697 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2699 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2700 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2701 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2702 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2703 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2704 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2705 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2706 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2708 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2710 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2712 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2713 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2716 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2717 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2718 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2719 control like taskset for example.
2721 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2723 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2724 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2725 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2726 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2727 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2728 includes %C when context information is available.
2730 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2731 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2732 rather than a file system attribute.
2734 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2735 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2736 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2737 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2739 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2740 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2741 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2743 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2744 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2745 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2748 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2752 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2753 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2755 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2757 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2758 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2760 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2761 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2762 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2763 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2765 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2766 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2767 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2771 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2772 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2774 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2775 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2776 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2778 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2779 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2780 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2781 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2782 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2783 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2784 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2785 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2786 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2788 ** Changes in behavior
2790 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2791 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2793 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2794 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2797 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2801 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2802 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2803 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2804 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2808 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2809 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2811 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2812 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2813 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2814 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2816 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2817 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2818 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2821 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2825 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2826 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2827 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2829 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2830 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2831 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2833 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2834 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2836 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2837 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2838 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2839 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2841 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2842 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2843 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2845 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2846 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2847 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2848 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2850 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2851 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2852 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2854 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2855 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2856 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2857 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2859 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2860 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2861 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2863 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2864 processes will not intersperse their output.
2865 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2868 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2872 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2873 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2875 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2876 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2878 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2879 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2880 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2881 the presence of the empty string argument.
2882 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2884 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2885 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2886 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2887 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2889 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2890 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2892 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2893 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2894 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2896 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2897 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2898 and with a malicious user on the same system
2899 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2900 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2903 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2907 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2908 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2909 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2911 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2912 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2913 offending directory and all "contents."
2915 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2916 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2917 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2919 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2920 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2921 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2923 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2924 processes will not intersperse their output.
2925 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2926 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2928 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2929 output the name of the file to stdout.
2930 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2932 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2933 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2934 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2936 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2937 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2940 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2941 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2942 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2944 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2945 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2946 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2947 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2948 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2949 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2951 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2952 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2953 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2954 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2956 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2957 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2959 ** Changes in behavior
2961 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2962 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2963 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2964 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2965 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2967 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2968 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2969 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2970 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2972 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2974 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2975 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2976 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2977 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2978 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2982 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2986 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2987 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2989 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2990 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2992 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2993 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2994 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2996 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2997 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3000 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3004 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3005 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3006 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3008 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3009 to accommodate leap seconds.
3010 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3012 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3013 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3014 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3016 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3018 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3019 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3020 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3022 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3023 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3024 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3025 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3026 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3030 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3031 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3032 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3033 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3035 ** Changes in behavior
3037 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3038 environment variable is set.
3040 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3041 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3042 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3046 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3047 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3048 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3049 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3051 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3052 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3053 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3054 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3058 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3059 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3060 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3062 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3063 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3064 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3065 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3066 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3067 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3068 another improvement:
3070 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
3071 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3074 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3078 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3079 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3080 and libraries tested at configure time.
3081 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3083 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3084 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3086 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3087 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3089 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3090 printing a summary to stderr.
3091 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3093 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3094 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3095 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3097 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3098 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3100 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3101 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3102 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3103 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3105 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3106 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3107 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3108 which is relatively unusual.
3109 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3111 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3112 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3113 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3114 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3115 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3116 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3117 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3121 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3122 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3123 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3124 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3125 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3129 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3130 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3132 ** Changes in behavior
3134 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3135 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3136 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3137 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3138 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3141 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3145 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3146 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3148 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3149 before data copying has started.
3151 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3152 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3154 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3155 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3156 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3157 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3159 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3160 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3161 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3162 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3164 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3169 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3170 for its standard streams.
3172 ** Changes in behavior
3174 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3175 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3176 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3177 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3178 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3179 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3181 ** Deprecated options
3183 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3184 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3188 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3190 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3191 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3192 a btrfs file system.
3194 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3196 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3197 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3199 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3200 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3203 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3207 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3208 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3209 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3210 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3212 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3213 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3214 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3215 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3216 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3221 make check: two tests have been corrected
3225 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3226 inherited from gnulib.
3229 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3233 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3234 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3235 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3236 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3238 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3239 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3241 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3243 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3244 systems without xattr support.
3246 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3247 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3248 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3250 ** Changes in behavior
3252 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3253 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3254 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3255 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3257 ** Improved robustness
3259 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3260 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3261 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3262 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3263 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3264 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3265 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3266 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3267 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3271 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3272 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3274 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3275 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3276 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3277 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3278 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3281 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3285 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3286 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3287 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3291 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3292 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3293 data was read, or on process exit.
3294 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3296 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3297 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3298 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3299 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3301 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3302 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3303 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3304 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3306 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3307 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3309 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3310 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3312 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3313 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3314 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3316 ** Changes in behavior
3318 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3319 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3320 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3322 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3323 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3325 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3326 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3327 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3330 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3334 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3336 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3337 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3338 install: Never copies xattrs
3340 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3341 from overwriting any existing destination file
3343 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3344 mode where this feature is available.
3346 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3347 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3348 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3349 do not modify the destination at all.
3351 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3353 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3357 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3358 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3360 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3362 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3363 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3365 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3366 processing the first file name
3368 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3369 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3370 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3371 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3373 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3374 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3376 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3377 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3380 ** Changes in behavior
3382 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3383 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3385 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3386 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3387 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3389 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3390 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3392 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3394 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3395 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3396 is still marked with a '+'.
3399 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3403 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3404 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3408 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3409 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3410 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3411 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3412 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3413 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3415 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3416 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3418 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3419 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3421 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3423 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3424 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3425 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3427 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3428 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3430 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3431 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3432 used to factor large numbers.
3434 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3437 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3439 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3441 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3442 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3444 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3445 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3446 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3447 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3449 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3450 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3451 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3453 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3454 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3458 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3460 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3461 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3463 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3464 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3466 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3468 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3469 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3473 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3474 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3475 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3477 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3479 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3480 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3481 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3483 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3484 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3485 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3487 ** Changes in behavior
3489 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3490 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3493 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3497 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3498 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3499 'futimens' system calls.
3503 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3505 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3506 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3507 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3509 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3510 with no USERNAME argument.
3512 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3513 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3514 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3516 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3517 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3518 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3519 number of fields for some inputs.
3521 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3522 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3524 ** Changes in behavior
3526 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3527 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3530 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3534 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3536 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3537 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3538 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3539 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3541 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3542 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3544 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3545 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3547 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3548 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3550 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3551 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3552 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3553 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3555 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3556 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3557 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3558 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3559 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3560 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3562 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3563 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3565 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3566 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3567 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3569 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3570 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3572 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3573 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3575 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3576 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3577 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3578 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3580 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3581 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3583 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3584 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3586 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3587 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3588 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3592 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3593 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3595 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3596 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3597 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3598 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3602 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3603 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3605 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3607 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3611 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3612 which have negative errno values.
3616 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3620 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3624 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3625 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3628 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3632 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3633 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3634 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3636 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3637 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3638 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3639 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3643 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3644 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3645 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3646 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3649 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3653 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3655 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3656 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3657 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3660 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3664 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3665 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3667 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3669 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3671 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3673 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3677 ** Changes in behavior
3679 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3680 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3682 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3683 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3685 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3686 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3687 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3691 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3692 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3693 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3694 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3695 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3696 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3697 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3698 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3699 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3700 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3701 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3703 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3704 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3705 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3708 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3711 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3712 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3713 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3715 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3716 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3717 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3720 ** New build options
3722 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3723 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3724 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3725 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3727 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3728 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3729 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3730 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3731 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3732 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3733 of "make check" fail.
3735 ** Remove deprecated options
3737 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3738 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3739 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3740 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3741 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3743 ** Improved robustness
3745 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3746 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3747 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3748 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3749 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3750 loss of the contents of a/f.
3752 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3753 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3757 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3758 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3759 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3761 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3762 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3763 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3764 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3766 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3767 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3768 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3769 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3770 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3771 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3772 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3773 destination is a symlink.
3775 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3777 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3778 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3780 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3781 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3783 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3785 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3786 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3788 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3789 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3791 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3794 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3795 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3797 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3798 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3800 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3801 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3802 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3803 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3805 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3806 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3807 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3809 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3810 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3811 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3813 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3814 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3815 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3816 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3818 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3819 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3820 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3822 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3823 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3825 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3826 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3828 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3830 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3831 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3832 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3834 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3835 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3837 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3838 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3840 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3841 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3843 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3844 [present in the original version]
3847 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3851 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3853 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3854 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3855 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3857 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3858 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3860 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3864 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3865 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3867 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3868 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3870 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3871 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3873 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3874 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3875 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3876 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3877 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3878 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3880 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3881 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3884 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3885 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3887 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3890 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3891 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3892 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3894 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3895 directory is unreadable.
3897 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3898 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3899 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3901 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3902 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3903 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3904 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3905 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3908 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3909 Before it would print nothing.
3911 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3913 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3914 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3915 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3916 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3917 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3918 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3919 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3920 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3922 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3926 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3927 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3928 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3930 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3931 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3932 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3933 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3936 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3940 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3941 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3942 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3943 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3944 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3945 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3946 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3948 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3949 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3950 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3951 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3952 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3953 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3954 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3955 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3957 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3958 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3959 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3962 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3966 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3967 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3969 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3970 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3971 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3973 ** Improved robustness
3975 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3976 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3977 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3980 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3984 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3985 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3986 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3987 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3988 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3990 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3994 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3997 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4001 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4002 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4003 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4004 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4006 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4007 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4009 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4010 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4011 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4014 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4016 ** Improved robustness
4018 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4019 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4021 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4022 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4023 or NFS-mounted partition.
4025 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4026 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4030 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4031 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4032 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4033 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4034 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4035 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4037 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4038 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4040 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4041 or neglect to report file removal.
4043 For the "groups" command:
4045 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4046 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4048 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4050 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4052 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4056 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4057 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4060 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4062 ** Changes in behavior
4064 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4065 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4066 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4067 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4069 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4070 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4071 a final './' or '../' component.
4073 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4074 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4075 this only for pipes.
4077 ** Infrastructure changes
4079 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4080 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4081 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4082 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4086 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4087 name is "." or "..".
4089 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4090 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4091 dirent.d_type support.
4093 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4094 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4096 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4097 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4098 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4099 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4102 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4104 ** Changes in behavior
4106 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4110 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4111 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4115 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4116 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4117 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4119 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4120 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4122 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4123 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4125 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4127 ** Improved robustness
4129 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4130 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4131 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4133 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4134 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4137 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4138 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4140 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4141 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4143 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4144 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4146 ** Changes in behavior
4148 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4149 where the two are distinct.
4151 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4152 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4153 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4154 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4155 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4156 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4157 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4158 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4159 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4160 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4161 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4162 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4163 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4164 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4165 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4166 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4167 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4169 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4170 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4171 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4173 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4174 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4175 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4176 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4179 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4180 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4184 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4185 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4186 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4187 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4189 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4190 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4191 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4193 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4194 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4195 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4196 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4197 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4200 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4201 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4203 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4204 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4205 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4206 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4208 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4209 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4210 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4212 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4213 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4214 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4215 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4217 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4218 and sticky) with the -m option.
4220 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4221 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4222 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4223 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4224 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4226 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4227 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4229 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4233 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4234 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4235 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4236 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4238 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4240 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4242 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4243 silently ignoring one of them.
4245 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4246 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4247 containing this change was 5.92.
4249 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4250 automatically newline terminated.
4252 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4253 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4254 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4255 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4258 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4259 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4260 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4263 ** Scheduled for removal
4265 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4266 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4268 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4269 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4270 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4271 command to unlink a directory.
4273 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4274 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4275 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4276 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4280 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4281 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4282 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4283 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4284 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4285 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4289 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4290 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4292 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4294 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4295 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4296 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4298 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4299 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4302 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4303 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4305 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4306 list directories before files.
4308 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4309 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4310 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4311 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4314 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4316 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4318 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4319 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4320 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4322 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4323 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4327 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4328 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4329 usually printing nothing.
4331 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4333 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4334 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4335 them with hard-linked directories.
4337 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4338 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4339 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4341 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4342 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4343 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4345 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4348 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4349 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4351 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4352 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4354 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4355 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4357 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4358 all command-line arguments.
4360 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4362 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4364 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4365 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4367 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4369 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4370 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4371 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4372 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4373 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4375 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4376 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4378 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4379 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4380 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4381 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4383 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4385 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4389 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4390 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4392 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4393 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4395 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4396 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4398 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4399 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4401 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4402 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4404 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4406 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4407 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4408 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4411 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4413 ** Build-related bug fixes
4415 installing .mo files would fail
4418 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4422 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4424 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4427 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4431 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4432 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4436 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4438 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4439 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4441 ** Deprecated options
4443 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4444 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4446 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4450 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4452 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4453 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4454 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4455 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4457 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4460 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4466 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4471 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4473 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4475 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4476 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4477 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4479 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4480 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4481 problematic usages. These include:
4483 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4484 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4485 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4486 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4487 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4488 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4489 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4490 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4491 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4493 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4494 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4496 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4497 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4498 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4499 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4501 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4502 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4503 between binary and text files.
4505 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4509 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4513 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4514 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4516 head tac tail tee tr
4517 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4519 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4520 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4522 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4523 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4524 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4526 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4528 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4530 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4531 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4532 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4536 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4538 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4539 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4541 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4542 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4543 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4547 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4548 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4552 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4553 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4554 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4558 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4559 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4563 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4565 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4567 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4571 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4572 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4573 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4575 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4576 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4577 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4578 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4579 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4581 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4585 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4586 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4587 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4589 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4591 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4592 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4593 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4594 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4596 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4598 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4599 rather than silently wrapping around.
4601 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4602 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4604 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4605 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4607 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4608 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4609 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4610 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4612 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4614 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4616 ** Improved robustness
4618 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4619 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4620 no matter how large the result.
4622 ** Improved portability
4624 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4625 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4627 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4629 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4630 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4631 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4633 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4634 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4638 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4639 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4641 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4643 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4644 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4645 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4646 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4648 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4649 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4651 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4652 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4653 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4655 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4657 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4658 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4660 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4661 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4663 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4665 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4666 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4668 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4669 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4671 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4672 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4673 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4675 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4677 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4679 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4683 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4685 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4686 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4687 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4689 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4690 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4692 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4693 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4694 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4696 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4697 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4699 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4700 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4701 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4702 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4704 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4705 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4707 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4708 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4709 the file system does not support it.
4711 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4713 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4714 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4716 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4718 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4719 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4721 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4722 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4723 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4724 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4726 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4727 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4730 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4731 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4732 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4733 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4735 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4736 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4737 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4738 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4740 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4741 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4743 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4745 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4746 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4747 reporting incorrect results.
4751 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4752 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4754 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4757 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4759 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4760 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4762 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4763 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4765 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4768 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4769 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4770 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4771 the file name does not look like a page range.
4773 printf has several changes:
4775 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4776 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4778 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4779 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4780 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4782 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4783 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4786 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4787 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4789 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4790 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4792 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4794 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4795 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4797 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4799 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4801 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4802 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4803 when first encountering the directory.
4807 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4808 output; POSIX requires this.
4810 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4811 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4813 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4815 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4816 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4818 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4819 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4821 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4822 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4823 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4824 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4825 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4826 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4827 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4829 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4830 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4831 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4833 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4834 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4836 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4838 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4840 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4841 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4842 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4843 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4845 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4849 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4850 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4851 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4852 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4853 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4855 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4856 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4857 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4859 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4860 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4862 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4863 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4865 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4866 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4867 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4868 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4869 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4871 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4872 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4874 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4875 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4877 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4879 nocreat do not create the output file
4880 excl fail if the output file already exists
4881 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4882 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4884 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4886 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4887 direct use direct I/O for data
4888 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4889 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4890 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4891 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4892 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4894 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4896 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4897 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4900 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4901 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4902 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4903 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4904 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4905 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4907 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4908 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4910 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4913 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4915 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4917 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4918 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4920 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4921 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4922 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4924 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4925 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4926 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4928 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4930 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4931 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4933 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4934 for compatibility with bash.
4936 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4938 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4939 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4940 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4941 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4943 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4944 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4946 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4947 ls supports TABSIZE.
4948 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4949 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4950 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4952 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4955 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4957 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4958 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4959 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4960 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4961 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4962 an offset, not as a file name.
4964 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4965 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4967 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4968 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4970 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4971 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4973 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4974 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4975 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4977 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4978 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4980 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4981 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4985 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4987 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4989 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4993 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4994 or more arguments between partitions.
4996 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4997 holes in the destination.
4999 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5000 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5001 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5002 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5003 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5004 terminates immediately.
5006 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5008 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5010 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5011 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5012 not the empty string.
5014 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5015 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5019 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5020 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5021 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5024 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5031 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5035 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5036 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5038 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5039 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5041 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5042 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5043 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5046 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5050 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5051 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5053 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5054 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5056 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5057 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5058 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5060 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5062 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5065 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5067 ** Configuration option
5069 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5070 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5074 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5075 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5079 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5080 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5081 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5084 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5085 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5086 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5087 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5088 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5089 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5090 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5093 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5097 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5098 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5099 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5101 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5102 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5104 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5106 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5107 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5108 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5109 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5111 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5113 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5114 not just the ones that reference directories
5116 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5117 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5119 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5120 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5121 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5123 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5124 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5125 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5126 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5127 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5128 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5130 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5135 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5136 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5138 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5140 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5142 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5144 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5145 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5147 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5148 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5150 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5152 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5156 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5158 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5160 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5161 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5162 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5163 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5164 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5166 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5167 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5169 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5170 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5172 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5173 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5175 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5176 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5177 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5181 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5182 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5183 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5184 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5185 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5186 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5187 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5188 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5189 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5190 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5191 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5192 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5193 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5194 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5196 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5198 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5199 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5201 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5203 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5205 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5206 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5208 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5210 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5211 without a trailing newline.
5213 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5214 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5216 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5219 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5223 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5225 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5227 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5228 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5229 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5230 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5232 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5234 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5235 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5236 be printed without leading spaces.
5238 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5239 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5244 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5245 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5246 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5248 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5250 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5251 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5253 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5254 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5256 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5257 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5259 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5261 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5263 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5265 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5266 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5268 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5270 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5272 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5273 byte offsets are specified.
5276 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5279 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5282 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5283 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5284 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5285 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5286 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5287 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5288 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5289 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5290 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5291 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5292 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5293 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5294 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5295 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5296 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5297 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5298 directory where M has write access.
5299 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5300 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5301 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5304 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5305 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5306 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5307 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5308 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5309 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5310 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5311 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5312 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5313 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5314 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5315 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5316 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5317 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5318 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5319 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5320 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5321 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5322 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5323 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5324 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5325 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5326 appeared one additional time.
5328 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5329 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5330 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5331 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5334 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5335 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5336 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5337 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5338 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5339 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5340 if there were more than 338.
5342 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5343 - false --help now exits nonzero
5346 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5347 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5348 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5349 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5352 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5353 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5354 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5355 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5356 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5359 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5360 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5361 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5362 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5363 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5364 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5365 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5368 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5369 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5370 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5371 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5372 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5373 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5375 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5376 under certain unusual conditions
5377 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5378 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5381 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5382 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5383 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5384 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5385 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5386 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5387 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5388 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5389 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5390 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5391 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5392 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5393 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5394 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5395 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5396 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5399 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5400 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5403 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5404 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5405 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5406 involving hard-linked directories
5407 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5408 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5409 character-special and block files
5412 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5413 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5414 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5415 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5416 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5417 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5418 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5419 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5420 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5422 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5423 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5424 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5425 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5426 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5427 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5428 specified on the command line.
5429 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5430 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5431 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5432 the first file untouched.
5433 * readlink: new program
5434 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5435 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5436 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5437 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5438 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5439 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5442 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5443 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5444 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5445 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5446 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5447 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5448 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5449 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5450 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5451 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5452 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5453 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5455 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5456 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5457 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5459 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5460 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5461 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5462 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5463 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5464 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5465 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5466 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5469 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5470 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5473 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5474 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5475 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5476 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5477 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5478 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5479 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5482 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5483 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5485 ========================================================================
5486 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5487 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5490 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5492 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5493 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5494 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5495 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5496 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5497 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5498 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5499 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5500 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5501 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5502 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5503 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5505 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5506 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5507 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5508 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5510 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5513 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5515 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5516 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5517 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5518 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5519 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5520 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5521 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5524 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5525 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5526 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5527 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5528 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5529 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5530 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5531 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5532 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5533 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5534 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5535 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5536 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5537 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5538 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5539 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5541 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5542 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5544 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5545 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5546 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5547 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5548 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5549 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5551 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5552 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5553 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5554 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5555 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5556 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5557 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5559 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5560 the source files in the following example:
5561 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5562 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5563 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5564 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5565 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5566 links between source files with --preserve=links
5567 * cp accepts new options:
5568 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5569 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5570 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5571 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5572 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5573 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5574 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5575 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5576 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5578 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5579 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5580 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5581 even though it's older than dest.
5582 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5583 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5584 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5585 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5586 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5588 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5589 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5590 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5591 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5592 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5593 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5594 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5596 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5597 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5598 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5600 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5601 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5602 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5603 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5604 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5605 This is the default.
5607 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5608 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5609 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5610 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5611 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5613 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5616 ========================================================================
5617 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5618 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5621 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5622 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5624 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5625 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5626 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5627 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5628 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5630 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5631 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5632 that specifies a non-directory
5635 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5636 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5637 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5638 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5639 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5640 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5641 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5642 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5643 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5644 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5645 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5646 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5647 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5648 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5649 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5650 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5651 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5652 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5653 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5654 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5655 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5656 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5657 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5658 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5660 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5661 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5662 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5664 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5666 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5667 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5669 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5670 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5671 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5672 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5673 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5675 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5676 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5677 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5678 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5679 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5681 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5683 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5684 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5685 * still more portability fixes
5686 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5687 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5689 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5691 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5693 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5695 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5696 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5697 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5698 there is any time remaining
5699 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5701 ========================================================================
5702 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5703 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5705 This package began as the union of the following:
5706 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5708 ========================================================================
5710 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5712 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5713 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5714 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5715 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5716 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5717 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.