1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
8 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
9 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
10 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
12 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
13 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
14 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
15 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
16 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
18 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
19 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
20 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
21 now fails instead of losing the data.
22 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
24 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
25 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
26 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
28 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
29 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
32 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
33 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
36 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
37 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
38 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
40 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
41 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
42 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
44 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
45 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
47 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
48 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
49 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
51 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
52 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
54 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
55 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
56 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
57 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
59 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
60 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
61 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
63 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
64 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
65 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
67 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
68 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
72 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
73 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
74 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
76 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
77 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
79 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
83 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
85 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped
86 and the reader of the pipe terminates.
88 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
89 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
90 is effective in this case.
93 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
97 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
98 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
99 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
101 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
102 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
105 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
106 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
107 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
109 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
110 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
113 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
114 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
115 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
117 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
118 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
119 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
120 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
121 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
123 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
124 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
125 depending on the size of the first file processed.
126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
130 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
131 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
132 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
133 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
135 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
136 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
137 time zone is indeterminate.
139 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
140 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
141 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
142 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
144 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
145 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
146 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
148 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
149 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
151 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
152 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
153 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
157 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
158 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
159 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
162 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
166 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
167 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
170 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
171 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
172 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
174 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
175 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
176 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
177 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
178 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
180 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
181 System V style platforms where this information is available only
182 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
184 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
185 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
187 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
188 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
189 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
191 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
192 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
193 defaults to a different SELinux context.
195 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
198 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
199 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
200 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
202 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
203 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
205 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
206 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
207 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
209 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
211 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
212 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
214 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
215 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
217 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
218 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
220 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
221 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
223 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
224 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
225 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
226 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
228 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
229 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
230 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
232 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
233 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
234 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
236 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
237 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
238 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
240 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
241 only doing so if --retry is specified.
242 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
244 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
245 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
247 ** Changes in behavior
249 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
251 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
252 values for any argument.
254 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
255 they are out of localtime range.
257 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
258 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
259 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
260 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
264 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
265 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
266 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
268 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
269 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
271 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
272 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
274 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
276 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
277 written to a terminal.
279 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
280 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
282 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
283 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
284 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
285 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
286 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
287 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
288 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
289 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
290 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
291 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
292 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
294 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
295 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
299 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
300 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
304 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
306 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
307 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
309 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
312 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
316 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
317 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
318 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
319 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
321 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
322 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
324 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
325 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
326 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
328 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
331 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
332 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
333 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
335 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
336 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
338 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
339 that specify an offset for the first field.
340 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
342 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
343 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
347 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
348 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
352 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
353 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
355 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
356 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
357 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
358 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
359 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
361 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
362 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
363 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
365 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
366 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
367 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
369 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
370 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
372 ** Changes in behavior
374 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
375 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
377 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
378 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
380 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
381 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
383 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
384 when outputting to a terminal.
386 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
390 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
391 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
393 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
394 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
396 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
397 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
398 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
400 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
401 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
403 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
404 upon detection of a directory cycle.
405 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
407 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
409 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
410 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
411 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
413 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
414 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
417 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
421 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
422 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
424 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
425 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
427 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
428 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
429 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
431 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
432 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
433 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
434 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
436 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
437 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
438 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
439 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
441 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
442 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
444 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
445 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
447 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
448 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
449 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
451 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
452 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
453 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
455 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
456 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
457 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
459 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
460 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
461 character at the 4GiB position.
462 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
464 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
465 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
467 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
468 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
470 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
471 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
474 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
475 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
477 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
478 replaced before inotify watches were created.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
481 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
482 [bug introduced in the beginning]
484 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
485 when those files are being created or renamed.
486 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
490 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
491 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
492 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
493 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
495 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
496 on stderr approximately every second.
498 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
499 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
501 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
502 other than the default newline character.
504 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
505 a useful setting with high latency links.
507 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
508 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
510 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
511 and output errors in general.
513 ** Changes in behavior
515 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
516 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
517 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
518 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
520 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
521 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
522 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
523 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
524 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
526 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
527 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
529 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
531 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
532 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
534 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
535 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
539 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
540 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
542 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
543 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
545 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
546 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
548 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
549 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
551 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
553 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
554 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
555 documentation are provided.
558 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
562 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
563 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
565 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
566 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
567 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
568 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
570 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
571 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
572 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
573 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
575 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
576 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
578 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
579 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
581 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
582 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
583 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
584 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
585 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
586 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
600 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
602 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
603 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
604 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
605 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
606 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
607 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
609 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
610 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
611 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
612 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
614 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
615 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
616 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
618 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
619 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
620 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
623 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
624 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
625 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
627 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
628 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
629 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
631 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
632 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
633 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
634 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
635 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
637 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
638 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
641 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
642 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
644 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
645 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
646 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
648 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
649 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
651 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
652 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
654 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
655 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
657 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
658 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
660 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
661 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
662 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
664 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
665 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
669 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
670 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
672 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
673 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
674 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
675 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
676 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
677 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
678 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
679 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
680 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
681 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
682 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
683 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
684 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
685 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
686 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
687 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
688 it suitable for embedded system.
690 ** Changes in behavior
692 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
693 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
695 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
696 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
698 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
699 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
700 will result in the delayed output of lines.
702 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
703 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
704 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
708 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
709 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
710 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
712 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
714 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
715 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
716 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
718 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
719 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
720 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
721 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
723 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
724 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
726 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
727 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
728 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
731 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
735 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
736 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
737 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
739 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
740 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
741 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
742 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
744 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
745 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
746 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
748 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
749 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
751 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
753 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
754 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
755 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
757 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
758 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
759 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
761 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
762 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
763 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
764 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
766 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
767 from the source, when copying across file systems.
768 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
770 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
771 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
772 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
774 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
775 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
777 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
778 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
779 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
780 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
782 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
783 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
784 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
786 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
787 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
788 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
792 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
793 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
794 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
796 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
797 used to identify the split points.
799 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
800 command line argument through to the output.
802 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
805 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
806 a NUL instead of a white space character.
808 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
809 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
811 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
813 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
814 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
815 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
817 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
818 unique groups with empty lines.
820 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
821 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
823 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
826 ** Changes in behavior
828 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
829 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
830 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
831 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
833 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
834 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
836 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
837 not just the transfer counts.
839 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
841 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
842 as per the documented interface.
846 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
848 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
849 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
850 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
851 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
853 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
854 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
855 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
856 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
858 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
859 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
860 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
862 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
863 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
865 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
866 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
868 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
872 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
875 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
879 numfmt: reformat numbers
883 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
884 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
885 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
887 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
888 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
889 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
891 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
892 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
896 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
897 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
899 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
900 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
901 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
903 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
904 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
905 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
907 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
908 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
909 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
911 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
912 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
913 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
915 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
916 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
917 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
919 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
920 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
922 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
923 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
925 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
926 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
927 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
929 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
930 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
931 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
933 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
934 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
935 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
937 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
938 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
939 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
940 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
942 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
943 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
944 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
946 ** Changes in behavior
948 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
949 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
950 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
951 'total' in the target column.
953 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
954 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
955 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
957 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
958 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
960 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
961 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
965 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
966 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
968 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
969 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
971 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
975 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
976 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
977 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
978 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
979 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
980 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
981 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
982 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
983 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
984 for a patched distribution package.
986 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
987 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
989 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
990 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
991 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
992 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
995 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
999 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1001 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1002 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1003 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1007 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1008 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1009 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1010 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1013 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1014 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1016 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1017 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1018 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1019 eventually exits nonzero.
1021 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1022 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1023 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1024 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1025 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1027 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1028 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1029 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1031 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1032 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1035 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1036 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1037 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1039 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1040 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1041 Before, this would infloop:
1042 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1043 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1045 ** Changes in behavior
1047 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1051 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1052 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1053 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1054 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1055 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1058 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1059 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1060 format-changing options.
1062 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1063 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1064 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1065 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1066 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1070 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1071 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1072 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1073 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1074 are run without following the instructions in README.
1076 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1077 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1078 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1079 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1080 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1081 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1082 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1085 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1089 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1090 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1091 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1092 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1094 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1095 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1096 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1097 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1099 sort -u could read freed memory.
1100 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1101 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1102 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1106 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1107 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1108 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1109 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1112 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1116 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1117 processes will not intersperse their output.
1118 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1120 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1121 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1122 date: invalid date '\260'
1123 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1125 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1126 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1127 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1128 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1130 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1131 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1132 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1134 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1135 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1136 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1137 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1138 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1139 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1141 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1142 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1144 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1145 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1147 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1148 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1149 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1151 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1152 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1153 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1157 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1159 ** Changes in behavior
1161 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1162 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1163 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1164 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1165 have any reason to include it here.
1169 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1170 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1171 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1173 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1174 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1175 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1178 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1182 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1183 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1184 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1185 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1186 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1187 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1189 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1190 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1191 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1192 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1193 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1194 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1195 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1197 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1198 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1200 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1201 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1205 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1206 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1208 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1210 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1212 ** Changes in behavior
1214 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1215 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1216 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1218 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1219 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1222 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1226 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1227 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1228 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1229 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1230 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1231 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1232 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1233 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1235 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1236 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1237 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1238 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1239 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1241 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1242 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1244 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1245 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1247 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1248 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1250 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1251 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1253 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1254 additional static suffix to output file names.
1256 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1257 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1258 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1260 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1261 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1265 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1266 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1267 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1269 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1270 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1271 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1272 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1273 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1274 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1276 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1277 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1278 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1279 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1280 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1282 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1283 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1284 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1285 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1289 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1290 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1291 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1293 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1294 instead of causing a usage failure.
1296 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1299 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1303 realpath: print resolved file names.
1307 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1308 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1310 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1311 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1313 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1314 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1315 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1316 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1317 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1318 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1320 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1321 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1322 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1324 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1325 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1326 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1328 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1329 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1330 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1331 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1332 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1334 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1336 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1337 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1339 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1340 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1341 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1343 ** Changes in behavior
1345 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1346 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1347 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1348 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1349 usually-short referent instead.
1351 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1352 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1353 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1354 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1357 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1361 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1362 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1363 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1365 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1366 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1368 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1369 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1373 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1374 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1376 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1377 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1378 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1379 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1381 ** Changes in behavior
1383 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1384 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1385 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1389 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1390 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1391 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1394 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1398 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1399 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1400 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1402 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1403 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1405 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1406 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1407 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1408 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1409 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1411 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1412 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1413 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1414 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1415 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1416 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1417 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1418 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1420 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1421 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1423 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1424 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1426 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1427 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1429 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1430 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1431 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1433 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1434 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1435 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1436 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1438 ** Changes in behavior
1440 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1441 when -v or -c specified.
1443 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1444 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1448 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1449 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1450 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1451 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1452 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1454 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1455 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1456 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1458 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1459 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1460 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1461 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1462 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1463 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1464 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1466 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1467 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1468 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1472 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1473 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1475 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1478 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1479 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1481 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1482 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1484 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1485 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1487 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1489 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1493 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1494 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1496 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1499 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1503 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1504 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1506 ** Changes in behavior
1508 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1509 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1510 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1511 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1512 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1513 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1514 resolved for 2.6.39.
1515 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1516 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1517 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1521 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1524 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1528 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1529 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1530 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1532 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1533 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1534 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1536 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1537 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1538 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1540 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1541 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1543 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1544 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1546 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1547 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1549 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1550 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1554 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1555 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1556 processed portion thereof.
1558 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1559 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1561 ** Changes in behavior
1563 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1564 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1565 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1567 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1568 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1569 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1571 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1572 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1574 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1575 Use --preserve-context instead.
1577 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1580 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1584 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1585 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1586 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1587 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1588 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1590 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1591 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1593 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1594 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1595 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1597 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1598 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1600 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1601 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1605 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1606 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1607 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1608 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1609 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1610 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1611 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1612 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1614 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1615 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1616 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1618 ** Changes in behavior
1620 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1621 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1622 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1625 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1629 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1630 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1631 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1634 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1638 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1639 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1641 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1642 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1644 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1645 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1647 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1648 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1649 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1650 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1652 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1653 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1655 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1656 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1657 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1659 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1661 ** Changes in behavior
1663 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1664 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1665 to the number of available processors.
1669 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1672 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1676 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1677 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1678 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1679 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1681 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1682 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1683 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1685 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1686 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1688 ** Changes in behavior
1690 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1691 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1693 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1694 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1695 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1696 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1697 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1698 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1700 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1701 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1702 the same way as the others.
1704 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1705 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1708 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1712 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1713 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1714 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1716 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1717 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1719 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1720 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1721 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1723 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1724 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1726 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1727 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1729 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1730 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1731 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1733 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1734 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1735 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1736 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1740 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1741 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1743 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1746 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1747 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1749 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1751 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1752 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1753 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1755 ** Changes in behavior
1757 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1758 rather than its aliased target.
1760 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1761 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1762 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1764 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1765 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1766 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1767 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1768 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1769 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1770 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1771 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1773 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1775 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1777 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1778 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1781 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1782 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1783 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1784 control like taskset for example.
1786 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1788 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1789 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1790 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1791 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1792 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1793 includes %C when context information is available.
1795 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1796 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1797 rather than a file system attribute.
1799 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1800 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1801 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1802 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1804 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1805 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1806 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1808 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1809 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1810 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1813 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1817 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1818 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1820 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1822 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1823 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1825 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1826 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1827 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1828 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1830 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1831 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1832 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1836 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1837 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1839 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1840 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1841 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1843 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1844 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1845 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1846 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1847 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1848 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1849 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1850 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1851 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1853 ** Changes in behavior
1855 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1856 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1858 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1859 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1862 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1866 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1867 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1868 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1869 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1873 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1874 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1876 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1877 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1878 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1879 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1881 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1882 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1883 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1886 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1890 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1891 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1892 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1894 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1895 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1896 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1898 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1899 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1901 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1902 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1903 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1904 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1906 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1907 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1908 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1910 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1911 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1912 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1913 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1915 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1916 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1917 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1919 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1920 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1921 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1922 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1924 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1925 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1926 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1928 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1929 processes will not intersperse their output.
1930 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1933 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1937 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1938 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1940 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1941 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1943 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1944 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1945 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1946 the presence of the empty string argument.
1947 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1949 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1950 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1951 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1952 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1954 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1955 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1957 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1958 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1959 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1961 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1962 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1963 and with a malicious user on the same system
1964 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1965 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1968 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1972 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1973 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1974 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1976 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1977 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1978 offending directory and all "contents."
1980 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1981 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1982 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1984 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1985 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1986 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1988 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1989 processes will not intersperse their output.
1990 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1991 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1993 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1994 output the name of the file to stdout.
1995 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1997 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1998 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1999 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2001 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2002 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2005 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2006 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2007 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2009 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2010 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2011 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2012 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2013 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2014 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2016 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2017 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2018 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2019 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2021 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2022 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2024 ** Changes in behavior
2026 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2027 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2028 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2029 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2030 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2032 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2033 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2034 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2035 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2037 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2039 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2040 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2041 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2042 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2043 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2047 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2051 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2052 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2054 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2055 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2057 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2058 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2059 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2061 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2062 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2065 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2069 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2070 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2071 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2073 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2074 to accommodate leap seconds.
2075 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2077 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2078 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2079 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2081 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2083 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2084 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2085 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2087 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2088 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2089 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2090 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2091 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2095 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2096 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2097 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2098 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2100 ** Changes in behavior
2102 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2103 environment variable is set.
2105 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2106 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2107 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2111 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2112 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2113 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2114 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2116 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2117 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2118 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2119 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2123 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2124 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2125 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2127 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2128 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2129 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2130 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2131 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2132 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2133 another improvement:
2135 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2136 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2139 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2143 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2144 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2145 and libraries tested at configure time.
2146 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2148 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2149 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2151 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2152 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2154 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2155 printing a summary to stderr.
2156 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2158 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2159 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2160 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2162 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2163 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2165 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2166 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2167 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2168 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2170 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2171 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2172 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2173 which is relatively unusual.
2174 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2176 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2177 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2178 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2179 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2180 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2181 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2182 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2186 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2187 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2188 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2189 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2190 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2194 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2195 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2197 ** Changes in behavior
2199 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2200 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2201 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2202 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2203 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2206 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2210 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2211 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2213 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2214 before data copying has started.
2216 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2217 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2219 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2220 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2221 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2222 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2224 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2225 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2226 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2227 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2229 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2234 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2235 for its standard streams.
2237 ** Changes in behavior
2239 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2240 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2241 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2242 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2243 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2244 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2246 ** Deprecated options
2248 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2249 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2253 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2255 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2256 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2257 a btrfs file system.
2259 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2261 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2262 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2264 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2265 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2268 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2272 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2273 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2274 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2275 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2277 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2278 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2279 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2280 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2281 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2286 make check: two tests have been corrected
2290 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2291 inherited from gnulib.
2294 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2298 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2299 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2300 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2301 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2303 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2304 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2306 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2308 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2309 systems without xattr support.
2311 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2312 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2313 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2315 ** Changes in behavior
2317 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2318 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2319 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2320 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2322 ** Improved robustness
2324 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2325 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2326 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2327 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2328 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2329 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2330 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2331 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2332 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2336 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2337 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2339 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2340 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2341 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2342 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2343 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2346 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2350 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2351 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2352 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2356 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2357 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2358 data was read, or on process exit.
2359 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2361 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2362 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2363 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2364 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2366 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2367 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2368 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2369 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2371 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2372 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2374 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2375 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2377 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2378 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2379 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2381 ** Changes in behavior
2383 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2384 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2385 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2387 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2388 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2390 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2391 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2392 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2395 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2399 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2401 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2402 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2403 install: Never copies xattrs
2405 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2406 from overwriting any existing destination file
2408 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2409 mode where this feature is available.
2411 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2412 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2413 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2414 do not modify the destination at all.
2416 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2418 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2422 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2423 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2425 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2427 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2428 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2430 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2431 processing the first file name
2433 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2434 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2435 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2436 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2438 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2439 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2441 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2442 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2445 ** Changes in behavior
2447 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2448 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2450 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2451 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2452 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2454 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2455 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2457 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2459 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2460 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2461 is still marked with a '+'.
2464 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2468 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2469 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2473 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2474 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2475 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2476 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2477 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2478 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2480 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2481 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2483 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2484 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2486 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2488 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2489 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2490 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2492 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2493 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2495 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2496 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2497 used to factor large numbers.
2499 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2502 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2504 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2506 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2507 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2509 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2510 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2511 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2512 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2514 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2515 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2516 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2518 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2519 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2523 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2525 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2526 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2528 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2529 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2531 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2533 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2534 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2538 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2539 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2540 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2542 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2544 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2545 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2546 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2548 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2549 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2550 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2552 ** Changes in behavior
2554 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2555 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2558 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2562 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2563 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2564 'futimens' system calls.
2568 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2570 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2571 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2572 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2574 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2575 with no USERNAME argument.
2577 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2578 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2579 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2581 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2582 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2583 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2584 number of fields for some inputs.
2586 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2587 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2589 ** Changes in behavior
2591 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2592 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2595 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2599 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2601 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2602 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2603 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2604 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2606 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2607 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2609 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2610 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2612 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2613 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2615 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2616 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2617 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2618 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2620 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2621 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2622 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2623 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2624 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2625 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2627 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2628 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2630 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2631 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2632 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2634 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2635 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2637 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2638 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2640 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2641 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2642 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2643 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2645 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2646 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2648 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2649 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2651 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2652 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2653 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2657 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2658 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2660 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2661 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2662 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2663 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2667 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2668 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2670 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2672 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2676 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2677 which have negative errno values.
2681 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2685 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2689 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2690 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2693 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2697 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2698 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2699 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2701 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2702 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2703 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2704 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2708 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2709 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2710 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2711 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2714 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2718 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2720 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2721 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2722 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2725 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2729 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2730 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2732 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2734 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2736 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2738 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2742 ** Changes in behavior
2744 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2745 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2747 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2748 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2750 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2751 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2752 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2756 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2757 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2758 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2759 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2760 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2761 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2762 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2763 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2764 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2765 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2766 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2768 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2769 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2770 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2773 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2776 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2777 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2778 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2780 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2781 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2782 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2785 ** New build options
2787 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2788 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2789 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2790 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2792 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2793 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2794 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2795 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2796 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2797 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2798 of "make check" fail.
2800 ** Remove deprecated options
2802 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2803 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2804 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2805 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2806 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2808 ** Improved robustness
2810 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2811 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2812 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2813 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2814 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2815 loss of the contents of a/f.
2817 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2818 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2822 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2823 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2824 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2826 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2827 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2828 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2829 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2831 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2832 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2833 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2834 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2835 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2836 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2837 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2838 destination is a symlink.
2840 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2842 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2843 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2845 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2846 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2848 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2850 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2851 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2853 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2854 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2856 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2859 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2860 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2862 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2863 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2865 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2866 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2867 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2868 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2870 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2871 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2872 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2874 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2875 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2876 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2878 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2879 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2880 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2881 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2883 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2884 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2885 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2887 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2888 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2890 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2891 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2893 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2895 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2896 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2897 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2899 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2900 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2902 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2903 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2905 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2906 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2908 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2909 [present in the original version]
2912 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2916 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2918 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2919 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2920 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2922 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2923 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2925 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2929 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2930 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2932 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2933 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2935 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2936 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2938 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2939 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2940 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2941 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2942 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2943 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2945 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2946 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2949 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2950 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2952 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2955 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2956 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2957 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2959 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2960 directory is unreadable.
2962 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2963 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2964 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2966 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2967 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2968 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2969 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2970 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2973 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2974 Before it would print nothing.
2976 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2978 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2979 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2980 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2981 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2982 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2983 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2984 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2985 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2987 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2991 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2992 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2993 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2995 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2996 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2997 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2998 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3001 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3005 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3006 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3007 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3008 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3009 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3010 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3011 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3013 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3014 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3015 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3016 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3017 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3018 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3019 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3020 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3022 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3023 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3024 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3027 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3031 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3032 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3034 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3035 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3036 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3038 ** Improved robustness
3040 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3041 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3042 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3045 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3049 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3050 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3051 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3052 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3053 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3055 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3059 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3062 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3066 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3067 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3068 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3069 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3071 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3072 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3074 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3075 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3076 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3079 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3081 ** Improved robustness
3083 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3084 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3086 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3087 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3088 or NFS-mounted partition.
3090 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3091 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3095 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3096 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3097 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3098 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3099 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3100 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3102 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3103 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3105 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3106 or neglect to report file removal.
3108 For the "groups" command:
3110 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3111 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3113 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3115 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3117 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3121 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3122 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3125 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3127 ** Changes in behavior
3129 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3130 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3131 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3132 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3134 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3135 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3136 a final './' or '../' component.
3138 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3139 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3140 this only for pipes.
3142 ** Infrastructure changes
3144 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3145 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3146 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3147 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3151 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3152 name is "." or "..".
3154 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3155 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3156 dirent.d_type support.
3158 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3159 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3161 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3162 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3163 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3164 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3167 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3169 ** Changes in behavior
3171 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3175 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3176 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3180 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3181 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3182 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3184 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3185 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3187 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3188 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3190 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3192 ** Improved robustness
3194 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3195 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3196 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3198 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3199 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3202 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3203 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3205 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3206 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3208 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3209 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3211 ** Changes in behavior
3213 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3214 where the two are distinct.
3216 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3217 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3218 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3219 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3220 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3221 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3222 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3223 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3224 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3225 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3226 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3227 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3228 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3229 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3230 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3231 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3232 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3234 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3235 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3236 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3238 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3239 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3240 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3241 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3244 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3245 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3249 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3250 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3251 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3252 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3254 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3255 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3256 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3258 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3259 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3260 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3261 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3262 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3265 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3266 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3268 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3269 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3270 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3271 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3273 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3274 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3275 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3277 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3278 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3279 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3280 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3282 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3283 and sticky) with the -m option.
3285 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3286 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3287 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3288 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3289 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3291 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3292 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3294 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3298 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3299 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3300 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3301 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3303 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3305 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3307 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3308 silently ignoring one of them.
3310 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3311 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3312 containing this change was 5.92.
3314 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3315 automatically newline terminated.
3317 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3318 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3319 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3320 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3323 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3324 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3325 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3328 ** Scheduled for removal
3330 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3331 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3333 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3334 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3335 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3336 command to unlink a directory.
3338 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3339 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3340 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3341 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3345 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3346 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3347 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3348 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3349 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3350 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3354 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3355 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3357 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3359 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3360 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3361 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3363 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3364 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3367 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3368 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3370 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3371 list directories before files.
3373 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3374 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3375 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3376 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3379 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3381 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3383 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3384 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3385 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3387 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3388 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3392 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3393 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3394 usually printing nothing.
3396 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3398 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3399 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3400 them with hard-linked directories.
3402 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3403 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3404 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3406 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3407 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3408 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3410 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3413 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3414 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3416 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3417 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3419 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3420 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3422 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3423 all command-line arguments.
3425 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3427 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3429 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3430 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3432 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3434 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3435 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3436 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3437 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3438 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3440 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3441 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3443 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3444 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3445 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3446 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3448 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3450 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3454 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3455 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3457 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3458 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3460 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3461 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3463 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3464 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3466 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3467 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3469 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3471 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3472 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3473 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3476 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3478 ** Build-related bug fixes
3480 installing .mo files would fail
3483 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3487 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3489 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3492 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3496 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3497 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3501 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3503 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3504 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3506 ** Deprecated options
3508 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3509 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3511 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3515 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3517 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3518 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3519 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3520 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3522 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3525 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3531 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3536 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3538 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3540 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3541 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3542 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3544 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3545 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3546 problematic usages. These include:
3548 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3549 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3550 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3551 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3552 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3553 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3554 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3555 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3556 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3558 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3559 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3561 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3562 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3563 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3564 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3566 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3567 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3568 between binary and text files.
3570 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3574 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3578 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3579 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3581 head tac tail tee tr
3582 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3584 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3585 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3587 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3588 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3589 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3591 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3593 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3595 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3596 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3597 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3601 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3603 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3604 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3606 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3607 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3608 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3612 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3613 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3617 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3618 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3619 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3623 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3624 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3628 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3630 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3632 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3636 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3637 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3638 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3640 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3641 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3642 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3643 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3644 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3646 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3650 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3651 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3652 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3654 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3656 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3657 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3658 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3659 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3661 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3663 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3664 rather than silently wrapping around.
3666 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3667 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3669 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3670 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3672 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3673 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3674 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3675 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3677 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3679 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3681 ** Improved robustness
3683 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3684 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3685 no matter how large the result.
3687 ** Improved portability
3689 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3690 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3692 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3694 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3695 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3696 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3698 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3699 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3703 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3704 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3706 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3708 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3709 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3710 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3711 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3713 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3714 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3716 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3717 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3718 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3720 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3722 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3723 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3725 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3726 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3728 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3730 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3731 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3733 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3734 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3736 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3737 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3738 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3740 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3742 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3744 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3748 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3750 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3751 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3752 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3754 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3755 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3757 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3758 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3759 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3761 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3762 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3764 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3765 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3766 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3767 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3769 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3770 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3772 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3773 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3774 the file system does not support it.
3776 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3778 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3779 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3781 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3783 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3784 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3786 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3787 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3788 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3789 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3791 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3792 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3795 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3796 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3797 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3798 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3800 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3801 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3802 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3803 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3805 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3806 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3808 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3810 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3811 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3812 reporting incorrect results.
3816 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3817 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3819 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3822 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3824 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3825 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3827 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3828 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3830 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3833 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3834 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3835 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3836 the file name does not look like a page range.
3838 printf has several changes:
3840 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3841 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3843 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3844 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3845 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3847 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3848 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3851 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3852 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3854 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3855 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3857 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3859 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3860 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3862 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3864 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3866 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3867 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3868 when first encountering the directory.
3872 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3873 output; POSIX requires this.
3875 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3876 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3878 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3880 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3881 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3883 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3884 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3886 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3887 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3888 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3889 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3890 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3891 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3892 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3894 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3895 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3896 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3898 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3899 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3901 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3903 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3905 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3906 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3907 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3908 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3910 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3914 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3915 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3916 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3917 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3918 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3920 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3921 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3922 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3924 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3925 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3927 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3928 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3930 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3931 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
3932 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
3933 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3934 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
3936 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3937 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3939 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3940 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3942 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3944 nocreat do not create the output file
3945 excl fail if the output file already exists
3946 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3947 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3949 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3951 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3952 direct use direct I/O for data
3953 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3954 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3955 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3956 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3957 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3959 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3961 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3962 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3965 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3966 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3967 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3968 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3969 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3970 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3972 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3973 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3975 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3978 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3980 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3982 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3983 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3985 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3986 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3987 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3989 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3990 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3991 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3993 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3995 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3996 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
3998 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3999 for compatibility with bash.
4001 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4003 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4004 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4005 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4006 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4008 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4009 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4011 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4012 ls supports TABSIZE.
4013 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4014 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4015 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4017 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4020 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4022 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4023 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4024 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4025 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4026 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4027 an offset, not as a file name.
4029 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4030 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4032 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4033 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4035 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4036 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4038 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4039 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4040 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4042 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4043 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4045 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4046 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4050 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4052 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4054 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4058 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4059 or more arguments between partitions.
4061 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4062 holes in the destination.
4064 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4065 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4066 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4067 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4068 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4069 terminates immediately.
4071 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4073 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4075 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4076 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4077 not the empty string.
4079 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4080 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4084 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4085 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4086 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4089 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4096 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4100 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4101 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4103 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4104 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4106 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4107 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4108 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4111 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4115 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4116 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4118 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4119 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4121 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4122 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4123 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4125 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4127 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4130 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4132 ** Configuration option
4134 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4135 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4139 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4140 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4144 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4145 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4146 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4149 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4150 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4151 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4152 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4153 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4154 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4155 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4158 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4162 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4163 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4164 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4166 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4167 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4169 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4171 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4172 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4173 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4174 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4176 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4178 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4179 not just the ones that reference directories
4181 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4182 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4184 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4185 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4186 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4188 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4189 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4190 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4191 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4192 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4193 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4195 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4200 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4201 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4203 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4205 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4207 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4209 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4210 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4212 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4213 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4215 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4217 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4221 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4223 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4225 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4226 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4227 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4228 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4229 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4231 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4232 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4234 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4235 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4237 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4238 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4240 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4241 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4242 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4246 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4247 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4248 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4249 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4250 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4251 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4252 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4253 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4254 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4255 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4256 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4257 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4258 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4259 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4261 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4263 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4264 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4266 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4268 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4270 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4271 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4273 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4275 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4276 without a trailing newline.
4278 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4279 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4281 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4284 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4288 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4290 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4292 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4293 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4294 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4295 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4297 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4299 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4300 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4301 be printed without leading spaces.
4303 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4304 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4309 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4310 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4311 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4313 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4315 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4316 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4318 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4319 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4321 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4322 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4324 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4326 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4328 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4330 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4331 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4333 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4335 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4337 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4338 byte offsets are specified.
4341 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4344 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4347 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4348 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4349 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4350 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4351 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4352 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4353 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4354 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4355 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4356 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4357 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4358 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4359 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4360 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4361 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4362 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4363 directory where M has write access.
4364 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4365 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4366 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4369 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4370 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4371 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4372 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4373 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4374 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4375 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4376 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4377 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4378 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4379 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4380 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4381 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4382 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4383 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4384 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4385 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4386 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4387 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4388 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4389 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4390 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4391 appeared one additional time.
4393 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4394 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4395 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4396 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4399 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4400 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4401 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4402 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4403 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4404 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4405 if there were more than 338.
4407 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4408 - false --help now exits nonzero
4411 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4412 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4413 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4414 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4417 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4418 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4419 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4420 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4421 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4424 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4425 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4426 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4427 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4428 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4429 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4430 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4433 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4434 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4435 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4436 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4437 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4438 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4440 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4441 under certain unusual conditions
4442 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4443 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4446 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4447 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4448 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4449 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4450 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4451 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4452 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4453 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4454 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4455 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4456 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4457 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4458 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4459 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4460 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4461 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4464 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4465 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4468 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4469 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4470 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4471 involving hard-linked directories
4472 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4473 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4474 character-special and block files
4477 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4478 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4479 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4480 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4481 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4482 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4483 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4484 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4485 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4487 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4488 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4489 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4490 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4491 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4492 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4493 specified on the command line.
4494 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4495 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4496 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4497 the first file untouched.
4498 * readlink: new program
4499 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4500 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4501 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4502 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4503 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4504 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4507 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4508 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4509 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4510 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4511 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4512 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4513 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4514 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4515 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4516 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4517 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4518 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4520 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4521 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4522 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4524 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4525 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4526 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4527 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4528 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4529 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4530 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4531 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4534 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4535 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4538 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4539 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4540 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4541 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4542 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4543 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4544 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4547 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4548 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4550 ========================================================================
4551 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4552 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4555 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4557 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4558 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4559 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4560 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4561 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4562 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4563 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4564 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4565 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4566 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4567 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4568 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4570 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4571 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4572 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4573 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4575 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4578 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4580 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4581 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4582 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4583 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4584 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4585 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4586 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4589 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4590 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4591 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4592 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4593 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4594 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4595 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4596 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4597 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4598 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4599 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4600 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4601 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4602 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4603 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4604 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4606 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4607 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4609 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4610 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4611 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4612 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4613 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4614 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4616 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4617 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4618 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4619 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4620 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4621 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4622 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4624 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4625 the source files in the following example:
4626 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4627 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4628 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4629 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4630 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4631 links between source files with --preserve=links
4632 * cp accepts new options:
4633 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4634 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4635 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4636 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4637 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4638 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4639 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4640 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4641 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4643 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4644 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4645 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4646 even though it's older than dest.
4647 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4648 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4649 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4650 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4651 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4653 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4654 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4655 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4656 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4657 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4658 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4659 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4661 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4662 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4663 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4665 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4666 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4667 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4668 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4669 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4670 This is the default.
4672 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4673 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4674 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4675 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4676 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4678 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4681 ========================================================================
4682 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4683 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4686 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4687 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4689 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4690 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4691 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4692 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4693 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4695 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4696 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4697 that specifies a non-directory
4700 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4701 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4702 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4703 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4704 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4705 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4706 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4707 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4708 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4709 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4710 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4711 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4712 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4713 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4714 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4715 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4716 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4717 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4718 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4719 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4720 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4721 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4722 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4723 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4725 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4726 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4727 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4729 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4731 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4732 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4734 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4735 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4736 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4737 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4738 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4740 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4741 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4742 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4743 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4744 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4746 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4748 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4749 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4750 * still more portability fixes
4751 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4752 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4754 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4756 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4758 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4760 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4761 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4762 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4763 there is any time remaining
4764 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4766 ========================================================================
4767 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4768 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4770 This package began as the union of the following:
4771 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4773 ========================================================================
4775 Copyright (C) 2001-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4777 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4778 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4779 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4780 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4781 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4782 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.