1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, mv, and install no longer issue spurious diagnostics like "failed
8 to preserve ownership" when copying to GNU/Linux CIFS file systems.
9 They do this by working around some Linux CIFS bugs.
11 join and uniq now support multi-byte characters better.
12 For example, 'join -tX' now works even if X is a multi-byte character,
13 and both programs now treat multi-byte characters like U+3000
14 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE as blanks if the current locale treats them so.
16 numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
17 [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]
19 sort again handles thousands grouping characters in single-byte locales
20 where the grouping character is greater than CHAR_MAX. For e.g. signed
21 character platforms with a 0xA0 (aka  ) grouping character.
22 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
24 tail no longer mishandles input from files in /proc and /sys file systems,
25 on systems with a page size larger than the stdio BUFSIZ.
26 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
28 wc no longer fails to count unprintable characters as parts of words.
29 [bug introduced in textutils-2.1]
31 ** Changes in behavior
33 base32 and base64 no longer require padding when decoding.
34 Previously an error was given for non padded encoded data.
36 base32 and base64 have improved detection of corrupted encodings.
37 Previously encodings with non zero padding bits were accepted.
39 basenc --base16 -d now supports lower case hexadecimal characters.
40 Previously an error was given for lower case hex digits.
42 ls --dired now implies long format output without hyperlinks enabled,
43 and will take precedence over previously specified formats or hyperlink mode.
45 numfmt will accept lowercase 'k' to indicate Kilo or Kibi units on input,
46 and user lowercase 'k' when outputting such units in '--to=si' mode.
48 wc no longer ignores encoding errors when counting words.
49 Instead, it treats them as non white space.
53 chgrp now accepts the --from=OWNER:GROUP option to restrict changes to files
54 with matching current OWNER and/or GROUP, as already supported by chown(1).
56 tail now supports following multiple processes, with repeated --pid options.
60 SELinux operations in file copy operations are now more efficient,
61 avoiding unneeded MCS/MLS label translation.
63 wc is now much faster in single-byte locales and somewhat faster in
67 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
71 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
72 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
73 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
75 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
76 presented with malformed checksum lines.
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
79 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
80 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
81 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
83 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
84 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
87 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
88 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
90 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
91 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
92 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
93 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
95 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
96 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
97 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
99 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
100 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
102 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
103 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
104 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
106 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
107 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
108 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
110 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
111 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
112 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
115 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
116 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
118 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
119 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
120 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
122 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
123 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
124 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
126 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
127 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
128 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
130 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
131 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
132 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
134 ** Changes in behavior
136 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
137 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
138 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
140 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
141 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
142 checksum utilities with cksum.
144 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
145 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
146 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
147 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
148 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
149 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
153 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
154 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
155 reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
157 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
158 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
160 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
161 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
163 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
165 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
167 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
168 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
170 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
171 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
174 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
175 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
176 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
177 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
178 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
179 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
182 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
186 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
187 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
188 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
189 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
192 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
193 Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
194 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
197 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
198 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
199 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
201 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
202 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
203 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
204 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
206 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
207 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
209 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
210 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
211 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
213 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
214 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
215 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
216 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
218 ** Changes in behavior
220 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
221 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
222 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
223 due to -n, -i, or -u.
227 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
228 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
229 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
232 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
236 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
237 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
238 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
239 total line in this case.
240 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
242 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
243 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
244 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
246 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
247 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
249 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
250 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
251 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
252 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
254 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
255 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
256 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
257 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
258 which may have resulted in data corruption.
259 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
261 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
262 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
263 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
265 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
268 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
269 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
270 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
272 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
273 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
274 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
276 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
277 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
278 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
280 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
281 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
282 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
283 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
284 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
286 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
287 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
288 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
289 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
290 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
292 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
293 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
294 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
296 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
297 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
298 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
300 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
301 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
302 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
303 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
305 ** Changes in behavior
307 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
308 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
309 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
310 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
311 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
312 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
314 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
315 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
317 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
318 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
319 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
320 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
322 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
323 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
324 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
326 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
327 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
328 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
329 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
331 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
332 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
333 This behavior is now documented.
335 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
336 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
338 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
339 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
340 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
342 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
343 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
344 from errors from the invoked command.
346 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
347 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
348 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
351 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
355 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
356 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
358 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
359 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
361 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
362 print details on how a file is being copied.
364 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
365 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
367 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
368 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
370 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
371 asked to move a file to a different file system.
373 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
374 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
376 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
377 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
379 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
380 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
384 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
385 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
386 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
387 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
388 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
390 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
391 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
393 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
394 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
396 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
397 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
398 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
400 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
401 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
402 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
404 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
405 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
407 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
408 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
409 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
410 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
413 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
417 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
418 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
421 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
422 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
423 before adjusting it to the correct value.
424 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
426 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
427 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
428 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
430 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
431 and B is in some other file system.
432 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
434 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
435 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
436 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
438 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
441 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
442 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
443 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
444 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
445 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
447 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
448 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
449 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
451 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
452 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
455 ** Changes in behavior
457 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
458 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
459 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
461 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
462 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
463 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
464 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
466 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
467 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
469 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
470 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
471 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
473 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
474 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
476 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
477 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
478 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
479 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
480 though they still work.
482 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
483 capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
484 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
486 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
487 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
489 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
490 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
491 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
493 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
494 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
495 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
496 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
500 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
501 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
503 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
504 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
506 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
507 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
511 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
512 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
514 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
515 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
516 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
519 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
521 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
522 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
523 since synchronizing can take a long time.
525 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
527 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
528 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
530 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
532 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
533 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
534 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
538 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
539 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
542 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
546 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
549 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
550 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
551 is a non regular file.
552 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
554 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
555 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
556 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
558 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
559 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
561 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
562 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
564 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
565 heavily changed during the run.
566 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
568 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
569 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
571 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
572 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
574 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
575 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
577 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
578 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
580 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
581 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
582 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
584 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
585 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
587 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
588 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
590 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
591 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
594 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
595 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
596 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
598 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
599 invalid combinations of case character classes.
600 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
602 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
603 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
604 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
606 ** Changes in behavior
608 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
609 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
611 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
612 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
613 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
615 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
616 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
617 that was made in release 8.32.
619 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
620 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
621 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
623 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
624 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
626 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
627 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
631 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
632 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
633 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
634 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
636 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
638 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
639 when verifying tagged format checksums.
641 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
643 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
644 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
646 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
647 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
649 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
650 NUL instead of newline.
652 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
654 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
655 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
656 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
660 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
661 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
663 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
664 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
665 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
667 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
668 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
670 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
671 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
673 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
674 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
676 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
677 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
678 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
680 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
682 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
683 where avx2 instructions are supported.
684 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
687 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
691 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
692 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
693 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
695 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
696 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
697 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
698 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
699 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
701 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
702 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
703 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
704 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
705 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
706 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
708 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
709 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
711 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
712 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
713 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
716 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
717 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
718 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
719 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
721 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
722 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
724 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
725 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
726 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
727 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
729 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
730 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
731 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
733 ** Changes in behavior
735 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
736 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
737 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
738 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
739 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
742 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
743 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
744 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
745 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
746 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
747 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
748 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
749 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
752 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
753 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
754 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
755 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
757 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
758 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
759 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
761 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
762 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
766 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
767 file creation time, where available.
769 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
770 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
772 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
773 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
774 useful on network file systems.
778 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
779 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
781 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
782 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
783 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
787 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
790 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
794 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
795 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
797 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
798 after asking the user whether to proceed.
799 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
801 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
802 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
804 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
805 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
806 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
808 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
809 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
810 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
811 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
812 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
813 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
815 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
816 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
818 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
819 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
821 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
822 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
823 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
825 ** Changes in behavior
827 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
828 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
829 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
830 end-of-options marker.
832 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
835 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
836 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
838 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
839 environment variable is set.
841 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
842 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
843 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
844 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
845 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
847 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
849 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
850 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
851 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
852 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
854 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
855 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
859 id now supports specifying multiple users.
861 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
862 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
864 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
865 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
866 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
867 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
868 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
869 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
871 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
872 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
874 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
875 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
877 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
878 signal handling before executing a program.
882 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
883 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
884 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
888 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
889 which is common in Asian locales.
891 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
892 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
894 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
895 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
898 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
902 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
903 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
904 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
905 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
906 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
907 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
909 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
910 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
911 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
912 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
914 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
915 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
916 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
917 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
918 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
919 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
921 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
922 even if it can't be traversed.
923 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
925 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
926 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
927 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
929 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
930 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
932 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
933 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
934 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
935 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
936 now silently does nothing if A exists.
937 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
939 ** Changes in behavior
941 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
942 it is self referential.
944 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
948 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
950 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
951 each processing step.
953 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
954 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
957 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
958 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
959 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
961 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
962 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
966 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
967 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
969 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
970 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
971 and tail -f uses inotify.
973 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
974 which is especially significant on macOS.
977 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
981 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
982 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
984 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
985 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
986 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
987 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
989 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
990 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
992 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
993 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
995 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
996 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
997 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
999 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
1000 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1002 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
1003 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
1004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1006 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
1007 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
1008 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
1009 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
1010 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1014 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
1018 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
1020 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
1021 rather than reading from the start.
1023 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
1024 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
1025 for unknown long options.
1029 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
1030 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
1033 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
1037 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
1038 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
1039 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
1040 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1042 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
1043 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
1044 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
1045 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
1046 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1048 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
1049 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
1050 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
1051 now fails instead of losing the data.
1052 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1054 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
1055 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
1056 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1058 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
1059 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
1060 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1062 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
1063 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1064 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1066 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1067 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1070 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1071 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1072 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1074 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1075 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1076 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1078 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1079 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1080 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1082 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1083 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1086 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1087 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1089 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1090 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1091 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1093 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1094 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1096 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1097 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1098 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1099 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1101 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1102 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1103 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1105 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1106 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1107 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1109 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1110 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1114 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1115 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1116 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1118 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1119 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1121 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1122 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1124 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1125 executing the subsidiary program.
1127 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1129 ** Changes in behavior
1131 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1132 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1133 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1134 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1138 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1140 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1141 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1143 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1144 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1145 is effective in this case.
1148 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1152 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1153 as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
1154 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1156 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1157 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1160 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1161 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1162 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1164 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1165 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1166 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1168 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1169 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1170 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1172 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1173 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1174 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1175 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1176 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1178 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1179 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1180 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1181 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1185 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1186 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1187 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1188 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1190 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1191 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1192 time zone is indeterminate.
1194 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1195 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1196 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1197 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1199 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1200 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1201 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1203 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1204 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1206 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1207 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1208 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1212 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1213 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1214 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1217 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1221 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1222 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1225 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1226 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1227 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1229 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1230 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1231 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1232 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1233 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1235 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1236 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1237 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1239 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1240 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1242 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1243 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1246 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1247 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1248 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1250 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1251 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1253 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1254 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1255 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1257 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1258 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1260 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1261 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1262 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1264 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1266 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1267 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1269 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1270 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1272 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1273 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1275 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1276 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1278 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1279 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1280 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1281 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1283 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1284 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1285 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1287 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1288 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1289 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1291 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1292 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1293 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1295 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1296 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1297 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1299 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1302 ** Changes in behavior
1304 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1306 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1307 values for any argument.
1309 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1310 they are out of localtime range.
1312 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1313 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1314 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1315 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1319 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1320 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1321 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1323 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1324 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1326 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1327 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1329 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1331 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1332 written to a terminal.
1334 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1335 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1337 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1338 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1339 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1340 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1341 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1342 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1343 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1344 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1345 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1346 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1347 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1349 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1350 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1354 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1355 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1359 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1361 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1362 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1364 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1367 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1371 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1372 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1373 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1374 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1376 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1377 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1379 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1380 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1381 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1383 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1384 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1386 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1387 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1390 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1391 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1393 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1394 that specify an offset for the first field.
1395 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1397 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1398 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1402 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1403 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1407 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1408 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1410 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1411 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1412 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1413 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1414 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1416 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1417 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1418 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1420 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1421 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1422 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1424 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1425 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1427 ** Changes in behavior
1429 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1430 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1432 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1433 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1435 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1436 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1438 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1439 when outputting to a terminal.
1441 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1445 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1446 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1448 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1449 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1451 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1452 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1453 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1455 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1456 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1458 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1459 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1460 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1462 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1464 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1465 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1466 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1468 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1469 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1472 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1476 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1477 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1479 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1480 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1482 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1483 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1484 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1486 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1487 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1488 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1489 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1491 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1492 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1493 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1494 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1496 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1497 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1499 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1500 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1502 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1503 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1504 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1506 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1507 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1508 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1510 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1511 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1512 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1514 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1515 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1516 character at the 4GiB position.
1517 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1519 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1520 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1522 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1523 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1525 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1526 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1527 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1529 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1530 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1532 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1533 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1534 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1536 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1537 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1539 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1540 when those files are being created or renamed.
1541 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1545 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1546 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1547 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1548 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1550 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1551 on stderr approximately every second.
1553 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1554 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1556 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1557 other than the default newline character.
1559 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1560 a useful setting with high latency links.
1562 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1563 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1565 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1566 and output errors in general.
1568 ** Changes in behavior
1570 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1571 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1572 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1573 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1575 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1576 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1577 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1578 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1579 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1581 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1582 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1584 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1586 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1587 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1589 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1590 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1594 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1595 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1597 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1598 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1600 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1601 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1603 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1604 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1606 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1608 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1609 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1610 documentation are provided.
1613 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1617 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1618 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1620 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1621 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1622 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1623 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1625 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1626 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1627 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1628 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1630 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1631 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1633 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1634 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1636 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1637 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1638 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1639 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1640 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1641 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1642 values are in octal.
1655 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1657 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1658 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1659 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1660 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1661 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1662 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1664 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1665 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1666 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1667 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1669 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1670 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1671 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1673 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1674 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1675 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1676 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1678 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1679 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1680 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1682 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1683 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1684 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1686 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1687 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1688 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1689 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1690 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1692 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1693 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1694 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1696 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1697 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1699 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1700 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1701 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1703 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1704 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1706 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1707 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1709 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1710 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1712 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1713 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1715 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1716 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1717 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1719 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1720 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1724 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1725 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1727 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1728 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1729 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1730 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1731 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1732 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1733 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1734 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1735 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1736 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1737 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1738 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1739 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1740 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1741 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1742 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1743 it suitable for embedded system.
1745 ** Changes in behavior
1747 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1748 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1750 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1751 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1753 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1754 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1755 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1757 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1758 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1759 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1763 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1764 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1765 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1767 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1769 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1770 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1771 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1773 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1774 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1775 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1776 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1778 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1779 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1781 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1782 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1783 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1786 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1790 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
1791 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1792 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1794 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1795 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1796 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1797 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1799 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1800 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1801 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1803 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1804 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1806 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1808 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1809 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1810 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1812 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1813 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1814 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1816 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1817 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1818 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1819 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1821 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1822 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1823 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1825 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1826 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1827 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1829 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1830 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1832 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1833 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1834 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1835 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1837 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1838 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1839 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1841 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1842 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1843 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1847 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1848 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1849 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1851 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1852 used to identify the split points.
1854 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1855 command line argument through to the output.
1857 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1860 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1861 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1863 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1864 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1866 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1868 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1869 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1870 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1872 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1873 unique groups with empty lines.
1875 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1876 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1878 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1881 ** Changes in behavior
1883 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1884 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1885 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1886 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1888 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1889 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1891 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1892 not just the transfer counts.
1894 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1896 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1897 as per the documented interface.
1901 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1903 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1904 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1905 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1906 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1908 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1909 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1910 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1911 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1913 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1914 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1915 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1917 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1918 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1920 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1921 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1923 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1927 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1930 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1934 numfmt: reformat numbers
1938 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1939 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1940 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1942 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1943 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1944 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1946 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1947 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1951 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1952 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1954 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1955 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1956 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1958 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1959 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1960 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1962 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1963 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1964 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1966 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1967 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1968 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1970 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1971 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1972 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1974 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1975 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1977 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1978 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1980 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1981 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1982 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1984 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1985 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1986 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1988 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1989 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1990 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1992 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1993 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1994 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1995 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1997 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1998 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1999 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2001 ** Changes in behavior
2003 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
2004 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
2005 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
2006 'total' in the target column.
2008 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
2009 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
2010 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
2012 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
2013 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
2015 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
2016 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
2020 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
2021 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2023 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
2024 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
2026 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
2030 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
2031 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
2032 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
2033 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
2034 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
2035 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
2036 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
2037 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
2038 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
2039 for a patched distribution package.
2041 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
2042 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2044 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
2045 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
2046 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
2047 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
2050 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
2054 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
2056 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
2057 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
2058 sha384sum and sha512sum.
2062 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
2063 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2064 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2065 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2066 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2068 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2069 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2071 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2072 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2073 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2074 eventually exits nonzero.
2076 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2077 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2078 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2079 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2080 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2082 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2083 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2084 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2086 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2087 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2088 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2090 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2091 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2092 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2094 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2095 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2096 Before, this would infloop:
2097 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2098 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2100 ** Changes in behavior
2102 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2106 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2107 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2108 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2109 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2110 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2113 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2114 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2115 format-changing options.
2117 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2118 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2119 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2120 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2121 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2125 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2126 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2127 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2128 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2129 are run without following the instructions in README.
2131 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2132 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2133 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2134 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2135 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2136 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2137 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2140 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2144 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2145 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2146 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2147 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2149 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2150 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2151 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2152 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2154 sort -u could read freed memory.
2155 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2156 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2157 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2161 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2162 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2163 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2164 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2167 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2171 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2172 processes will not intersperse their output.
2173 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2175 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2176 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2177 date: invalid date '\260'
2178 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2180 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2181 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2182 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2183 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2185 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2186 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2187 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2189 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2190 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2191 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2192 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2193 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2194 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2196 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2197 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2199 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2200 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2202 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2203 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2204 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2206 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2207 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2208 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2212 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2214 ** Changes in behavior
2216 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2217 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2218 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2219 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2220 have any reason to include it here.
2224 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2225 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2226 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2228 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2229 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2230 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2233 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2237 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2238 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2239 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2240 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2241 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2242 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2244 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2245 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2246 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2247 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2248 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2249 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2250 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2252 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2253 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2255 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2256 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2260 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2261 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2263 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2265 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2267 ** Changes in behavior
2269 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2270 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2271 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2273 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2274 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2277 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2281 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2282 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2283 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2284 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2285 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2286 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2287 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2288 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2290 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2291 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2292 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2293 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2294 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2296 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2297 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2299 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2300 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2302 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2303 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2305 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2306 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2308 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2309 additional static suffix to output file names.
2311 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2312 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2313 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2315 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2316 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2320 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2321 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2322 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2324 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2325 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2326 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2327 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2328 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2329 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2331 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2332 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2333 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2334 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2335 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2337 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2338 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2339 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2340 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2344 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2345 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2346 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2348 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2349 instead of causing a usage failure.
2351 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2354 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2358 realpath: print resolved file names.
2362 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2363 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2365 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2366 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2368 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2369 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2370 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2371 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2372 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2373 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2375 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2376 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2377 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2379 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2380 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2381 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2383 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2384 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2385 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2386 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2387 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2389 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2391 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2392 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2394 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2395 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2396 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2398 ** Changes in behavior
2400 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2401 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2402 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2403 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2404 usually-short referent instead.
2406 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2407 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2408 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2409 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2412 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2416 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2417 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2418 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2420 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2421 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2423 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2424 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2428 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2429 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2431 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2432 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2433 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2434 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2436 ** Changes in behavior
2438 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2439 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2440 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2444 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2445 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2446 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2449 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2453 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2454 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2455 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2457 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2458 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2460 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2461 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2462 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2463 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2464 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2466 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2467 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2468 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2469 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2470 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2471 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2472 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2473 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2475 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2476 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2478 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2479 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2481 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2482 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2484 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2485 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2486 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2488 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2489 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2490 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2491 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2493 ** Changes in behavior
2495 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2496 when -v or -c specified.
2498 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2499 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2503 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2504 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2505 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2506 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2507 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2509 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2510 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2511 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2513 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2514 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2515 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2516 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2517 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2518 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2519 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2521 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2522 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2523 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2527 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2528 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2530 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2533 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2534 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2536 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2537 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2539 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2540 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2542 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2544 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2548 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2549 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2551 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2554 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2558 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2559 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2561 ** Changes in behavior
2563 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2564 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2565 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2566 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2567 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2568 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2569 resolved for 2.6.39.
2570 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2571 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2572 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2576 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2579 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2583 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2584 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2585 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2587 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2588 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2589 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2591 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2592 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2593 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2595 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2596 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2598 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2599 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2601 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2602 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2604 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2605 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2609 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2610 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2611 processed portion thereof.
2613 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2614 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2616 ** Changes in behavior
2618 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2619 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2620 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2622 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2623 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2624 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2626 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2627 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2629 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2630 Use --preserve-context instead.
2632 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2635 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2639 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2640 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2641 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2642 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2643 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2645 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2646 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2648 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2649 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2650 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2652 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2653 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2655 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2656 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2660 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2661 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2662 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2663 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2664 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2665 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2666 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2667 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2669 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2670 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2671 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2673 ** Changes in behavior
2675 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2676 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2677 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2680 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2684 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2685 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2686 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2689 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2693 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2694 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2696 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2697 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2699 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2700 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2702 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2703 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2704 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2705 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2707 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2708 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2710 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2711 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2712 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2714 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2716 ** Changes in behavior
2718 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2719 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2720 to the number of available processors.
2724 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2725 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2726 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2729 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2733 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2734 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2735 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2736 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2738 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2739 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2740 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2742 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2743 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2745 ** Changes in behavior
2747 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2748 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2750 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2751 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2752 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2753 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2754 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2755 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2757 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2758 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2759 the same way as the others.
2761 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2762 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2765 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2769 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2770 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2771 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2773 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2774 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2776 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2777 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2778 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2780 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2781 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2783 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2784 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2786 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2787 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2788 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2790 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2791 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2792 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2793 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2797 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2798 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2800 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2803 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2804 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2806 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2808 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2809 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2810 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2812 ** Changes in behavior
2814 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2815 rather than its aliased target.
2817 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2818 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2819 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2821 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2822 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2823 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2824 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2825 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2826 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2827 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2828 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2830 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2832 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2834 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2835 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2838 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2839 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2840 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2841 control like taskset for example.
2843 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2845 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2846 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2847 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2848 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2849 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2850 includes %C when context information is available.
2852 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2853 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2854 rather than a file system attribute.
2856 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2857 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2858 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2859 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2861 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2862 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2863 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2865 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2866 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2867 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2870 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2874 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2875 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2877 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2879 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2880 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2882 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2883 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2884 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2885 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2887 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2888 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2889 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2893 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2894 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2896 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2897 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2898 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2900 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2901 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2902 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2903 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2904 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2905 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2906 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2907 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2908 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2910 ** Changes in behavior
2912 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2913 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2915 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2916 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2919 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2923 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2924 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2925 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2926 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2930 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2931 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2933 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2934 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2935 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2936 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2938 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2939 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2940 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2943 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2947 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2948 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2949 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2951 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2952 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2953 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2955 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2956 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2958 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2959 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2960 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2961 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2963 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2964 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2965 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2967 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2968 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2969 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2970 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2972 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2973 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2974 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2976 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2977 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2978 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2979 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2981 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2982 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2983 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2985 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2986 processes will not intersperse their output.
2987 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2990 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2994 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2995 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2997 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2998 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
3000 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
3001 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
3002 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
3003 the presence of the empty string argument.
3004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3006 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3007 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
3008 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
3009 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3011 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
3012 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3014 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
3015 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
3016 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
3018 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
3019 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
3020 and with a malicious user on the same system
3021 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
3022 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
3025 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
3029 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
3030 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
3031 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
3033 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
3034 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
3035 offending directory and all "contents."
3037 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
3038 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
3039 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
3041 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
3042 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
3043 without capabilities were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3045 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
3046 processes will not intersperse their output.
3047 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3048 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3050 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
3051 output the name of the file to stdout.
3052 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3054 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
3055 call fails with errno == EACCES.
3056 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3058 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
3059 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
3062 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
3063 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3064 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3066 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3067 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3068 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3069 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3070 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3071 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3073 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3074 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3075 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3076 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3078 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3079 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3081 ** Changes in behavior
3083 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3084 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3085 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3086 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3087 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3089 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3090 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3091 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3092 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3094 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3096 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3097 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3098 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3099 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3100 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3104 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3108 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3109 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3111 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3112 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3114 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3115 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3116 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3118 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3119 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3122 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3126 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3127 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3128 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3130 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3131 to accommodate leap seconds.
3132 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3134 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3135 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3136 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3138 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3140 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3141 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3142 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3144 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3145 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3146 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3147 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3148 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3152 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3153 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3154 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3155 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3157 ** Changes in behavior
3159 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3160 environment variable is set.
3162 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3163 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3164 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3168 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3169 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3170 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3171 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3173 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3174 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3175 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3176 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3180 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3181 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3182 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3184 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3185 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3186 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3187 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3188 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3189 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3190 another improvement:
3192 rm -r is now slightly more standard-conforming when operating on
3193 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3196 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3200 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3201 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3202 and libraries tested at configure time.
3203 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3205 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3206 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3208 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3209 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3211 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3212 printing a summary to stderr.
3213 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3215 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3216 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3217 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3219 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3220 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3222 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3223 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3224 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3225 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3227 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3228 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3229 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3230 which is relatively unusual.
3231 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3233 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3234 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3235 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3236 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3237 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3238 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3239 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3243 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3244 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3245 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3246 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3247 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3251 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3252 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3254 ** Changes in behavior
3256 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3257 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3258 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3259 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3260 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3263 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3267 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3268 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3270 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3271 before data copying has started.
3273 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3274 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3276 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3277 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3278 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3279 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3281 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3282 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3283 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3284 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3286 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3291 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3292 for its standard streams.
3294 ** Changes in behavior
3296 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3297 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3298 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3299 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3300 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3301 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3303 ** Deprecated options
3305 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3306 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3310 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3312 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3313 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3314 a btrfs file system.
3316 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3318 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3319 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3321 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3322 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3325 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3329 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3330 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3331 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3332 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3334 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3335 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3336 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3337 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3338 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3343 make check: two tests have been corrected
3347 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3348 inherited from gnulib.
3351 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3355 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3356 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3357 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3358 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3360 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3361 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3363 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3365 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3366 systems without xattr support.
3368 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3369 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3370 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3372 ** Changes in behavior
3374 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3375 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3376 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3377 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3379 ** Improved robustness
3381 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3382 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3383 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3384 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3385 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3386 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3387 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3388 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3389 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3393 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3394 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3396 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3397 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3398 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3399 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3400 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3403 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3407 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3408 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3409 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3413 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3414 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3415 data was read, or on process exit.
3416 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3418 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3419 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3420 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3421 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3423 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3424 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3425 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3426 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3428 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3429 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3431 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3432 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3434 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3435 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3436 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3438 ** Changes in behavior
3440 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3441 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3442 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3444 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3445 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3447 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3448 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3449 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3452 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3456 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3458 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3459 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3460 install: Never copies xattrs
3462 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3463 from overwriting any existing destination file
3465 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3466 mode where this feature is available.
3468 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3469 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3470 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3471 do not modify the destination at all.
3473 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3475 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3479 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3480 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3482 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3484 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3485 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3487 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3488 processing the first file name
3490 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3491 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3492 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3493 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3495 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3496 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3498 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3499 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3502 ** Changes in behavior
3504 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3505 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3507 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3508 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3509 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3511 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3512 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3514 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3516 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3517 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3518 is still marked with a '+'.
3521 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3525 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3526 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3530 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3531 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3532 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3533 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3534 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3535 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3537 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3538 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3540 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3541 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3543 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3545 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3546 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3547 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3549 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3550 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3552 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3553 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3554 used to factor large numbers.
3556 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3559 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3561 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3563 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3564 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3566 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3567 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3568 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3569 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3571 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3572 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3573 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3575 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3576 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3580 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3582 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3583 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3585 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3586 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3588 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3590 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3591 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3595 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3596 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3597 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3599 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3601 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3602 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3603 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3605 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3606 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3607 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3609 ** Changes in behavior
3611 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3612 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3615 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3619 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3620 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3621 'futimens' system calls.
3625 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3627 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3628 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3629 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3631 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3632 with no USERNAME argument.
3634 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3635 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3636 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3638 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3639 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3640 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3641 number of fields for some inputs.
3643 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3644 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3646 ** Changes in behavior
3648 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3649 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3652 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3656 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3658 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3659 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3660 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3661 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3663 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3664 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3666 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3667 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3669 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3670 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3672 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3673 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3674 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3675 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3677 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3678 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3679 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3680 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3681 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3682 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3684 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3685 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3687 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3688 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3689 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3691 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3692 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3694 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3695 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3697 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3698 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3699 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3700 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3702 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3703 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3705 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3706 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3708 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3709 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3710 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3714 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3715 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3717 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3718 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3719 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3720 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3724 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3725 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3727 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3729 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3733 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3734 which have negative errno values.
3738 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3742 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3746 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3747 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3750 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3754 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3755 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3756 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3758 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3759 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3760 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3761 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3765 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3766 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3767 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3768 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3771 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3775 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3777 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3778 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3779 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3782 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3786 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3787 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3789 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3791 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3793 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3795 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3799 ** Changes in behavior
3801 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3802 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3804 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3805 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3807 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3808 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3809 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3813 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3814 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3815 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3816 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3817 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3818 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3819 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3820 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3821 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3822 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3823 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3825 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3826 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3827 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3830 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3833 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3834 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3835 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3837 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3838 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3839 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3842 ** New build options
3844 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3845 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3846 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3847 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3849 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3850 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3851 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3852 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3853 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3854 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3855 of "make check" fail.
3857 ** Remove deprecated options
3859 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3860 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3861 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3862 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3863 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3865 ** Improved robustness
3867 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3868 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3869 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3870 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3871 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3872 loss of the contents of a/f.
3874 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3875 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3879 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3880 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3881 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3883 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3884 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3885 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3886 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3888 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3889 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3890 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3891 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3892 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3893 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3894 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3895 destination is a symlink.
3897 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3899 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3900 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3902 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3903 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3905 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3907 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3908 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3910 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3911 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3913 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3916 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3917 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3919 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3920 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3922 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3923 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3924 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3925 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3927 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3928 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3929 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3931 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3932 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3933 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3935 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3936 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3937 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3938 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3940 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3941 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3942 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3944 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3945 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3947 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3948 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3950 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3952 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3953 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3954 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3956 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3957 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3959 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3960 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3962 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3963 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3965 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3966 [present in the original version]
3969 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3973 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3975 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3976 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3977 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3979 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3980 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3982 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3986 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3987 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3989 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3990 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3992 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3993 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3995 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3996 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3997 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3998 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3999 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
4000 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
4002 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
4003 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
4006 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
4007 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
4009 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
4012 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
4013 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
4014 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
4016 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
4017 directory is unreadable.
4019 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
4020 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
4021 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
4023 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
4024 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
4025 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
4026 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
4027 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
4030 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
4031 Before it would print nothing.
4033 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
4035 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
4036 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
4037 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
4038 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
4039 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
4040 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
4041 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
4042 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
4044 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
4048 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
4049 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
4050 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
4052 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
4053 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
4054 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
4055 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
4058 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
4062 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
4063 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4064 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4065 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4066 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4067 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4068 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4070 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4071 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4072 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4073 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4074 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4075 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4076 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4077 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4079 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4080 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4081 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4084 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4088 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4089 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4091 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4092 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4093 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4095 ** Improved robustness
4097 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4098 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4099 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4102 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4106 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4107 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4108 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4109 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4110 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4112 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4116 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4119 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4123 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4124 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4125 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4126 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4128 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4129 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4131 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4132 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4133 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4136 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4138 ** Improved robustness
4140 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4141 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4143 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4144 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4145 or NFS-mounted partition.
4147 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4148 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4152 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4153 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4154 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4155 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4156 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4157 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4159 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4160 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4162 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4163 or neglect to report file removal.
4165 For the "groups" command:
4167 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4168 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4170 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4172 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4174 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4178 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4179 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4182 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4184 ** Changes in behavior
4186 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4187 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4188 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4189 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4191 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4192 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4193 a final './' or '../' component.
4195 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4196 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4197 this only for pipes.
4199 ** Infrastructure changes
4201 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4202 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4203 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4204 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4208 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4209 name is "." or "..".
4211 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4212 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4213 dirent.d_type support.
4215 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4216 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4218 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4219 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4220 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4221 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4224 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4226 ** Changes in behavior
4228 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4232 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4233 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4237 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4238 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4239 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4241 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4242 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4244 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4245 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4247 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4249 ** Improved robustness
4251 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4252 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4253 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4255 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4256 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4259 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4260 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4262 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4263 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4265 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4266 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4268 ** Changes in behavior
4270 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4271 where the two are distinct.
4273 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4274 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4275 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4276 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4277 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4278 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4279 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4280 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4281 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4282 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4283 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4284 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4285 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4286 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4287 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4288 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4289 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4291 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4292 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4293 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4295 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4296 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4297 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4298 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4301 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4302 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4306 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4307 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4308 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4309 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4311 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4312 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4313 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4315 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4316 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4317 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4318 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4319 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4322 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4323 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4325 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4326 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4327 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4328 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4330 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4331 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4332 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4334 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4335 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4336 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4337 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4339 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4340 and sticky) with the -m option.
4342 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4343 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4344 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4345 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4346 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4348 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4349 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4351 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4355 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4356 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4357 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4358 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4360 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4362 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4364 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4365 silently ignoring one of them.
4367 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4368 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4369 containing this change was 5.92.
4371 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4372 automatically newline terminated.
4374 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4375 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4376 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4377 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4380 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4381 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4382 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4385 ** Scheduled for removal
4387 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4388 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4390 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4391 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4392 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4393 command to unlink a directory.
4395 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4396 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4397 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4398 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4402 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4403 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4404 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4405 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4406 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4407 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4411 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4412 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4414 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4416 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4417 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4418 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4420 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4421 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4424 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4425 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4427 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4428 list directories before files.
4430 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4431 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4432 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4433 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4436 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4438 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4440 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4441 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4442 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4444 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4445 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4449 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4450 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4451 usually printing nothing.
4453 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4455 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4456 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4457 them with hard-linked directories.
4459 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4460 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4461 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4463 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4464 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4465 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4467 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4470 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4471 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4473 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4474 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4476 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4477 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4479 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4480 all command-line arguments.
4482 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4484 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4486 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4487 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4489 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4491 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4492 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4493 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4494 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4495 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4497 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4498 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4500 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4501 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4502 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4503 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4505 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4507 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4511 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4512 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4514 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4515 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4517 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4518 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4520 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4521 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4523 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4524 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4526 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4528 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4529 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4530 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4533 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4535 ** Build-related bug fixes
4537 installing .mo files would fail
4540 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4544 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4546 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4549 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4553 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4554 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4558 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4560 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4561 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4563 ** Deprecated options
4565 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4566 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4568 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4572 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4574 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4575 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4576 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4577 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4579 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4582 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4588 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4593 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4595 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4597 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4598 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4599 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4601 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4602 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4603 problematic usages. These include:
4605 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4606 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4607 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4608 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4609 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4610 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4611 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4612 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4613 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4615 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4616 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4618 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4619 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4620 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4621 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4623 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4624 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4625 between binary and text files.
4627 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4631 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4635 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4636 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4638 head tac tail tee tr
4639 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4641 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4642 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4644 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4645 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4646 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4648 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4650 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4652 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4653 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4654 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4658 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4660 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4661 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4663 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4664 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4665 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4669 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4670 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4674 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4675 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4676 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4680 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4681 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4685 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4687 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4689 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4693 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4694 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4695 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4697 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4698 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4699 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4700 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4701 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4703 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4707 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4708 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4709 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4711 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4713 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4714 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4715 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4716 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4718 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4720 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4721 rather than silently wrapping around.
4723 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4724 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4726 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4727 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4729 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4730 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4731 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4732 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4734 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4736 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4738 ** Improved robustness
4740 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4741 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4742 no matter how large the result.
4744 ** Improved portability
4746 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4747 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4749 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4751 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4752 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4753 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4755 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4756 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4760 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4761 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4763 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4765 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4766 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4767 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4768 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4770 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4771 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4773 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4774 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4775 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4777 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4779 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4780 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4782 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4783 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4785 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4787 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4788 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4790 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4791 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4793 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4794 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4795 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4797 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4799 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4801 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4805 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4807 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4808 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4809 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4811 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4812 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4814 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4815 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4816 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4818 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4819 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4821 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4822 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4823 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4824 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4826 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4827 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4829 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4830 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4831 the file system does not support it.
4833 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4835 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4836 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4838 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4840 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4841 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4843 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4844 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4845 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4846 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4848 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4849 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4852 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4853 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4854 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4855 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4857 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4858 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4859 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4860 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4862 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4863 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4865 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4867 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4868 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4869 reporting incorrect results.
4873 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4874 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4876 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4879 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4881 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4882 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4884 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4885 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4887 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4890 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4891 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4892 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4893 the file name does not look like a page range.
4895 printf has several changes:
4897 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4898 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4900 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4901 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4902 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4904 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4905 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4908 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4909 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4911 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4912 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4914 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4916 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4917 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4919 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4921 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4923 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4924 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4925 when first encountering the directory.
4929 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4930 output; POSIX requires this.
4932 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4933 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4935 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4937 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4938 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4940 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4941 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4943 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4944 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4945 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4946 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4947 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4948 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4949 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4951 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4952 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4953 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4955 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4956 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4958 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4960 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4962 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4963 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4964 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4965 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4967 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4971 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4972 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4973 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4974 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4975 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4977 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4978 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4979 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4981 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4982 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4984 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4985 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4987 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4988 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4989 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4990 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4991 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4993 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4994 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4996 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4997 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4999 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
5001 nocreat do not create the output file
5002 excl fail if the output file already exists
5003 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
5004 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
5006 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
5008 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
5009 direct use direct I/O for data
5010 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
5011 sync likewise, but also for metadata
5012 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
5013 nofollow do not follow symlinks
5014 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
5016 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
5018 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
5019 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
5022 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
5023 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
5024 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
5025 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
5026 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
5027 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
5029 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
5030 list of NUL-terminated file names.
5032 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
5035 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
5037 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
5039 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
5040 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
5042 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
5043 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
5044 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
5046 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
5047 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
5048 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
5050 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
5052 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
5053 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
5055 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
5056 for compatibility with bash.
5058 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
5060 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
5061 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
5062 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
5063 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5065 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5066 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5068 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5069 ls supports TABSIZE.
5070 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5071 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5072 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5074 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5077 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5079 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5080 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5081 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5082 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5083 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5084 an offset, not as a file name.
5086 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5087 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5089 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5090 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5092 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5093 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5095 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5096 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5097 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5099 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5100 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5102 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5103 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5107 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5109 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5111 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5115 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5116 or more arguments between partitions.
5118 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5119 holes in the destination.
5121 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5122 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5123 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5124 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5125 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5126 terminates immediately.
5128 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5130 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5132 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5133 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5134 not the empty string.
5136 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5137 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5141 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5142 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5143 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5146 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5153 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5157 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5158 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5160 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5161 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5163 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5164 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5165 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5168 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5172 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5173 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5175 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5176 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5178 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5179 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5180 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5182 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5184 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5187 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5189 ** Configuration option
5191 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5192 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5196 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5197 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5201 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5202 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5203 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5206 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5207 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5208 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5209 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5210 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5211 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5212 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5215 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5219 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5220 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5221 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5223 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5224 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5226 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5228 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5229 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5230 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5231 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5233 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5235 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5236 not just the ones that reference directories
5238 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5239 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5241 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5242 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5243 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5245 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5246 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5247 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5248 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5249 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5250 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5252 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5257 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5258 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5260 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5262 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5264 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5266 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5267 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5269 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5270 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5272 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5274 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5278 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5280 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5282 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5283 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5284 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5285 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5286 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5288 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5289 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5291 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5292 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5294 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5295 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5297 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5298 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5299 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5303 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5304 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5305 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5306 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5307 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5308 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5309 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5310 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5311 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5312 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5313 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5314 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5315 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5316 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5318 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5320 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5321 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5323 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5325 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5327 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5328 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5330 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5332 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5333 without a trailing newline.
5335 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5336 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5338 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5341 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5345 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5347 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5349 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5350 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5351 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5352 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5354 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5356 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5357 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5358 be printed without leading spaces.
5360 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5361 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5366 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5367 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5368 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5370 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5372 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5373 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5375 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5376 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5378 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5379 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5381 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5383 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5385 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5387 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5388 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5390 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5392 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5394 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5395 byte offsets are specified.
5398 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5401 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5404 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5405 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5406 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5407 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5408 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5409 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5410 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5411 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5412 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5413 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5414 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5415 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5416 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5417 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5418 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5419 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5420 directory where M has write access.
5421 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5422 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5423 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5426 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5427 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5428 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5429 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5430 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5431 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5432 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5433 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5434 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5435 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5436 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5437 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5438 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5439 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5440 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5441 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5442 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5443 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5444 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5445 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5446 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5447 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5448 appeared one additional time.
5450 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5451 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5452 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5453 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5456 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5457 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5458 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5459 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5460 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5461 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5462 if there were more than 338.
5464 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5465 - false --help now exits nonzero
5468 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5469 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5470 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5471 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5474 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5475 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5476 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5477 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5478 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5481 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5482 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5483 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5484 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5485 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5486 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5487 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5490 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5491 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5492 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5493 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5494 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5495 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5497 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5498 under certain unusual conditions
5499 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5500 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5503 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5504 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5505 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5506 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5507 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5508 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5509 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5510 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5511 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5512 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5513 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5514 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5515 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5516 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5517 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5518 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5521 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5522 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5525 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5526 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5527 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5528 involving hard-linked directories
5529 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5530 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5531 character-special and block files
5534 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5535 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5536 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5537 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5538 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5539 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5540 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5541 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5542 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5544 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5545 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5546 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5547 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5548 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5549 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5550 specified on the command line.
5551 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5552 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5553 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5554 the first file untouched.
5555 * readlink: new program
5556 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5557 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5558 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5559 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5560 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5561 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5564 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5565 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5566 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5567 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5568 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5569 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5570 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5571 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5572 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5573 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5574 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5575 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5577 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5578 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5579 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5581 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5582 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5583 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5584 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5585 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5586 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5587 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5588 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5591 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5592 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5595 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5596 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5597 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5598 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5599 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5600 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5601 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5604 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5605 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5607 ========================================================================
5608 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5609 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5612 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5614 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5615 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5616 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5617 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5618 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5619 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5620 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5621 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5622 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5623 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5624 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5625 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5627 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5628 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5629 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5630 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5632 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5635 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5637 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5638 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5639 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5640 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5641 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5642 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5643 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5646 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5647 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5648 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5649 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5650 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5651 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5652 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5653 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5654 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5655 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5656 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5657 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5658 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5659 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5660 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5661 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5663 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5664 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5666 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5667 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5668 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5669 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5670 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5671 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5673 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5674 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5675 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5676 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5677 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5678 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5679 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5681 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5682 the source files in the following example:
5683 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5684 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5685 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5686 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5687 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5688 links between source files with --preserve=links
5689 * cp accepts new options:
5690 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5691 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5692 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5693 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5694 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5695 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5696 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5697 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5698 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5700 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5701 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5702 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5703 even though it's older than dest.
5704 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5705 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5706 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5707 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5708 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5710 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5711 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5712 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5713 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5714 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5715 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5716 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5718 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5719 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5720 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5722 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5723 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5724 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5725 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5726 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5727 This is the default.
5729 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5730 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5731 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5732 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5733 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5735 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5738 ========================================================================
5739 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5740 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5743 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5744 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5746 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5747 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5748 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5749 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5750 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5752 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5753 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5754 that specifies a non-directory
5757 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5758 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5759 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5760 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5761 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5762 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5763 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5764 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5765 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5766 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5767 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5768 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5769 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5770 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5771 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5772 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5773 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5774 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5775 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5776 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5777 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5778 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5779 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5780 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5782 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5783 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5784 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5786 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5788 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5789 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5791 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5792 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5793 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5794 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5795 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5797 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5798 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5799 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5800 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5801 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5803 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5805 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5806 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5807 * still more portability fixes
5808 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5809 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5811 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5813 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5815 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5817 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5818 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5819 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5820 there is any time remaining
5821 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5823 ========================================================================
5824 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5825 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5827 This package began as the union of the following:
5828 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5830 ========================================================================
5832 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5834 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5835 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5836 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5837 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5838 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5839 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.