1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
8 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
9 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
13 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also line numbers are
14 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
15 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
17 ** Changes in behavior
19 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
20 summary line, accommodating to the --output option where the target
21 field can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df
22 prints 'total' into the target column.
26 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
27 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
28 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
29 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
30 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
31 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
32 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
33 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
34 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
35 for a patched distribution package.
37 The check in the root-only tests to test whether our dummy user,
38 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, is able to run binaries from the build directory
39 failed. As a result, these tests have been skipped unnecessarily.
40 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
43 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
47 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
49 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
50 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
51 sha384sum and sha512sum.
55 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
56 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
57 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
58 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
59 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
61 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
62 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
64 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
65 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
66 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
67 eventually exits nonzero.
69 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
70 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
71 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
72 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
73 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
75 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
76 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
77 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
79 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
80 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
81 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
83 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
84 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
85 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
87 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
88 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
89 Before, this would infloop:
90 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
91 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
93 ** Changes in behavior
95 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
99 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
100 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
101 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
102 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
103 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
106 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
107 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
108 format-changing options.
110 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
111 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
112 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
113 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
114 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
118 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
119 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
120 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
121 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
122 are run without following the instructions in README.
124 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
125 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
126 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
127 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
128 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
129 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
130 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
133 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
137 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
138 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
139 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
140 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
142 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
143 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
144 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
145 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
147 sort -u could read freed memory.
148 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
149 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
154 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
155 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
156 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
157 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
160 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
164 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
165 processes will not intersperse their output.
166 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
168 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
169 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
170 date: invalid date '\260'
171 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
173 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
174 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
175 lines output by df, can work reliably.
176 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
178 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
179 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
180 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
182 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
183 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
184 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
185 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
186 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
187 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
189 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
192 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
193 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
195 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
196 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
197 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
199 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
200 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
201 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
205 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
207 ** Changes in behavior
209 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
210 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
211 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
212 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
213 have any reason to include it here.
217 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
218 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
219 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
221 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
222 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
223 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
226 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
230 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
231 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
232 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
233 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
234 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
235 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
237 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
238 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
239 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
240 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
241 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
242 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
243 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
245 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
246 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
248 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
249 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
253 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
254 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
256 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
258 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
260 ** Changes in behavior
262 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
263 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
264 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
266 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
267 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
270 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
274 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
275 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
276 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
277 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
278 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
279 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
280 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
281 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
283 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
284 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
285 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
286 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
287 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
289 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
290 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
292 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
293 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
295 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
296 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
298 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
299 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
301 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
302 additional static suffix to output file names.
304 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
305 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
306 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
308 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
309 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
313 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
314 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
315 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
317 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
318 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
319 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
320 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
321 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
322 typically still point to one of the hard links.
324 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
325 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
326 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
327 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
328 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
330 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
331 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
332 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
333 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
337 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
338 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
339 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
341 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
342 instead of causing a usage failure.
344 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
347 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
351 realpath: print resolved file names.
355 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
356 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
358 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
361 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
362 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
363 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
364 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
365 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
366 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
368 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
369 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
370 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
372 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
373 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
374 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
376 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
377 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
378 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
379 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
380 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
382 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
384 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
387 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
388 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
389 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
391 ** Changes in behavior
393 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
394 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
395 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
396 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
397 usually-short referent instead.
399 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
400 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
401 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
402 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
405 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
409 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
410 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
411 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
413 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
414 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
416 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
417 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
421 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
422 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
424 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
425 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
426 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
427 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
429 ** Changes in behavior
431 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
432 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
433 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
437 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
438 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
439 only .tar.xz files is enough.
442 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
446 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
447 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
448 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
450 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
451 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
453 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
454 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
455 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
456 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
457 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
459 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
460 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
461 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
462 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
463 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
464 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
465 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
466 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
468 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
469 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
471 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
472 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
474 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
475 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
477 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
478 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
479 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
481 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
482 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
483 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
484 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
486 ** Changes in behavior
488 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
489 when -v or -c specified.
491 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
492 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
496 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
497 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
498 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
499 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
500 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
502 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
503 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
504 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
506 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
507 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
508 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
509 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
510 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
511 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
512 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
514 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
515 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
516 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
520 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
521 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
523 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
526 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
527 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
529 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
530 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
532 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
533 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
535 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
537 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
541 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
542 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
544 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
547 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
551 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
552 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
554 ** Changes in behavior
556 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
557 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
558 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
559 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
560 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
561 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
563 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
564 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
565 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
569 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
572 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
576 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
577 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
578 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
580 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
581 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
582 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
584 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
585 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
586 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
588 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
589 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
591 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
594 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
595 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
597 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
598 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
602 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
603 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
604 processed portion thereof.
606 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
607 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
609 ** Changes in behavior
611 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
612 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
613 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
615 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
616 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
617 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
619 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
620 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
622 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
623 Use --preserve-context instead.
625 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
628 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
632 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
633 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
634 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
635 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
636 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
638 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
639 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
641 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
642 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
643 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
645 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
646 reject file names invalid for that file system.
648 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
649 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
653 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
654 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
655 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
656 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
657 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
658 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
659 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
660 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
662 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
663 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
664 the same number of fields are output for each line.
666 ** Changes in behavior
668 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
669 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
670 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
673 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
677 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
678 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
679 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
682 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
686 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
687 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
689 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
690 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
692 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
693 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
695 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
696 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
697 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
698 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
700 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
701 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
703 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
704 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
705 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
707 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
709 ** Changes in behavior
711 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
712 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
713 to the number of available processors.
717 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
720 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
724 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
725 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
726 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
727 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
729 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
730 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
731 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
733 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
734 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
736 ** Changes in behavior
738 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
739 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
741 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
742 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
743 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
744 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
745 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
746 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
748 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
749 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
750 the same way as the others.
753 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
757 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
758 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
759 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
761 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
762 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
764 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
765 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
766 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
768 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
769 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
771 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
772 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
774 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
775 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
776 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
778 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
779 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
780 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
781 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
785 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
786 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
788 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
791 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
792 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
794 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
796 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
797 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
798 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
800 ** Changes in behavior
802 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
803 rather than its aliased target.
805 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
806 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
807 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
809 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
810 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
811 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
812 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
813 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
814 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
815 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
816 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
818 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
820 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
822 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
823 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
826 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
827 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
828 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
829 control like taskset for example.
831 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
833 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
834 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
835 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
836 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
837 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
838 includes %C when context information is available.
840 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
841 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
842 rather than a file system attribute.
844 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
845 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
846 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
847 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
849 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
850 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
851 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
853 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
854 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
855 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
858 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
862 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
863 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
865 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
867 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
868 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
870 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
871 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
872 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
873 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
875 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
876 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
877 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
881 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
882 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
884 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
885 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
886 duration after the initial signal was sent.
888 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
889 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
890 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
891 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
892 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
893 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
894 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
895 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
896 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
898 ** Changes in behavior
900 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
901 sequence when it would be a no-op.
903 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
904 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
907 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
911 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
912 of available processors, which may not have been the case
913 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
914 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
918 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
919 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
921 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
922 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
923 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
924 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
926 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
927 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
928 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
931 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
935 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
936 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
937 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
939 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
940 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
941 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
943 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
944 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
946 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
947 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
948 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
949 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
951 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
952 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
953 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
955 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
956 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
957 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
958 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
960 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
961 renamed-aside and then recreated.
962 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
964 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
965 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
966 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
967 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
969 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
970 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
971 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
973 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
974 processes will not intersperse their output.
975 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
978 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
982 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
983 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
985 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
986 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
988 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
989 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
990 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
991 the presence of the empty string argument.
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
994 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
995 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
996 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
997 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
999 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1002 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1003 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1004 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1006 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1007 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1008 and with a malicious user on the same system
1009 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1010 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1013 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1017 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1018 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1019 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1021 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1022 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1023 offending directory and all "contents."
1025 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1026 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1027 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1029 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1030 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1031 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1033 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1034 processes will not intersperse their output.
1035 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1036 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1038 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1039 output the name of the file to stdout.
1040 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1042 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1043 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1044 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1046 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1047 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1050 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1051 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1052 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1054 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1055 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1056 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1057 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1058 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1059 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1061 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1062 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1063 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1064 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1066 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1067 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1069 ** Changes in behavior
1071 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1072 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1073 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1074 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1075 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1077 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1078 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1079 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1080 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1082 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1084 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1085 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1086 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1087 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1088 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1092 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1096 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1097 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1099 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1100 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1102 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1103 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1104 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1106 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1107 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1110 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1114 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1115 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1116 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1118 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1119 to accommodate leap seconds.
1120 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1122 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1123 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1124 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1126 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1128 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1129 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1130 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1132 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1133 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1134 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1135 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1136 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1140 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1141 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1142 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1143 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1145 ** Changes in behavior
1147 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1148 environment variable is set.
1150 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1151 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1152 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1156 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1157 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1158 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1159 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1161 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1162 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1163 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1164 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1168 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1169 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1170 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1172 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1173 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1174 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1175 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1176 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1177 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1178 another improvement:
1180 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1181 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1184 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1188 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1189 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1190 and libraries tested at configure time.
1191 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1193 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1194 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1196 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1197 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1199 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1200 printing a summary to stderr.
1201 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1203 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1204 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1205 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1207 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1208 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1210 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1211 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1212 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1213 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1215 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1216 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1217 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1218 which is relatively unusual.
1219 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1221 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1222 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1223 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1224 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1225 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1226 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1227 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1231 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1232 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1233 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1234 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1235 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1239 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1240 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1242 ** Changes in behavior
1244 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1245 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1246 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1247 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1248 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1251 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1255 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1256 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1258 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1259 before data copying has started.
1261 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1262 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1264 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1265 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1266 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1267 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1269 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1270 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1271 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1272 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1274 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1279 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1280 for its standard streams.
1282 ** Changes in behavior
1284 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1285 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1286 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1287 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1288 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1289 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1291 ** Deprecated options
1293 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1294 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1298 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1300 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1301 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1302 a btrfs file system.
1304 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1306 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1307 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1309 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1310 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1313 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1317 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1318 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1319 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1320 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1322 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1323 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1324 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1325 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1326 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1331 make check: two tests have been corrected
1335 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1336 inherited from gnulib.
1339 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1343 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1344 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1345 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1346 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1348 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1349 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1351 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1353 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1354 systems without xattr support.
1356 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1357 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1358 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1360 ** Changes in behavior
1362 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1363 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1364 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1365 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1367 ** Improved robustness
1369 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1370 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1371 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1372 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1373 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1374 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1375 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1376 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1377 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1381 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1382 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1384 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1385 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1386 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1387 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1388 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1391 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1395 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1396 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1397 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1401 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1402 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1403 data was read, or on process exit.
1404 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1406 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1407 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1408 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1409 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1411 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1412 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1413 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1414 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1416 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1417 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1419 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1420 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1422 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1423 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1424 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1426 ** Changes in behavior
1428 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1429 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1430 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1432 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1433 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1435 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1436 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1437 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1440 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1444 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1446 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1447 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1448 install: Never copies xattrs
1450 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1451 from overwriting any existing destination file
1453 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1454 mode where this feature is available.
1456 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1457 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1458 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1459 do not modify the destination at all.
1461 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1463 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1467 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1468 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1470 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1472 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1473 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1475 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1476 processing the first file name
1478 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1479 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1480 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1481 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1483 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1484 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1486 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1487 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1490 ** Changes in behavior
1492 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1493 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1495 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1496 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1497 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1499 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1500 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1502 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1504 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1505 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1506 is still marked with a '+'.
1509 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1513 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1514 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1518 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1519 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1520 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1521 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1522 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1523 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1525 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1526 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1528 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1529 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1531 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1533 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1534 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1535 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1537 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1538 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1540 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1541 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1542 used to factor large numbers.
1544 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1547 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1549 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1551 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1552 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1554 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1555 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1556 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1557 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1559 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1560 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1561 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1563 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1564 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1568 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1570 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1571 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1573 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1574 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1576 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1578 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1579 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1583 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1584 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1585 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1587 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1589 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1590 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1591 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1593 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1594 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1595 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1597 ** Changes in behavior
1599 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1600 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1603 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1607 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1608 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1609 'futimens' system calls.
1613 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1615 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1616 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1617 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1619 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1620 with no USERNAME argument.
1622 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1623 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1624 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1626 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1627 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1628 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1629 number of fields for some inputs.
1631 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1632 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1634 ** Changes in behavior
1636 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1637 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1640 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1644 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1646 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1647 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1648 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1649 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1651 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1652 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1654 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1655 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1657 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1658 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1660 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1661 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1662 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1663 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1665 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1666 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1667 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1668 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1669 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1670 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1672 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1673 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1675 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1676 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1677 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1679 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1680 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1682 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1683 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1685 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1686 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1687 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1688 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1690 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1691 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1693 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1694 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1696 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1697 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1698 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1702 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1703 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1705 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1706 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1707 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1708 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1712 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1713 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1715 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1717 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1721 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1722 which have negative errno values.
1726 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1730 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1734 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1735 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1738 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1742 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1743 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1744 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1746 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1747 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1748 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1749 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1753 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1754 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1755 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1756 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1759 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1763 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1765 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1766 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1767 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1770 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1774 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1775 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1777 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1779 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1781 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1783 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1787 ** Changes in behavior
1789 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1790 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1792 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1793 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1795 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1796 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1797 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1801 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1802 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1803 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1804 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1805 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1806 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1807 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1808 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1809 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1810 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1811 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1813 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1814 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1815 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1818 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1821 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1822 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1823 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1825 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1826 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1827 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1830 ** New build options
1832 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1833 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1834 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1835 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1837 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1838 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1839 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1840 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1841 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1842 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1843 of "make check" fail.
1845 ** Remove deprecated options
1847 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1848 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1849 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1850 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1851 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1853 ** Improved robustness
1855 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1856 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1857 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1858 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1859 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1860 loss of the contents of a/f.
1862 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1863 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1867 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1868 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1869 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1871 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1872 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1873 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1874 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1876 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1877 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1878 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1879 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1880 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1881 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1882 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1883 destination is a symlink.
1885 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1887 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1888 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1890 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1891 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1893 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1895 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1896 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1898 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1899 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1901 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1904 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1905 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1907 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1908 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1910 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1911 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1912 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1913 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1915 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1916 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1917 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1919 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1920 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1921 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1923 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1924 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1925 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1926 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1928 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1929 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1930 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1932 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1933 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1935 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1936 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1938 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1940 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1941 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1942 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1944 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1945 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1947 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1948 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1950 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1951 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1953 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1954 [present in the original version]
1957 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1961 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1963 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1964 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1965 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1967 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1968 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1970 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1974 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1975 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1977 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1978 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1980 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1981 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1983 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1984 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1985 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1986 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1987 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1988 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1990 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1991 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1994 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1995 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1997 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2000 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2001 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2002 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2004 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2005 directory is unreadable.
2007 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2008 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2009 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2011 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2012 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2013 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2014 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2015 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2018 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2019 Before it would print nothing.
2021 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2023 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2024 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2025 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2026 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2027 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2028 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2029 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2030 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2032 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2036 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2037 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2038 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2040 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2041 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2042 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2043 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2046 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2050 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2051 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2052 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2053 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2054 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2055 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2056 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2058 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2059 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2060 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2061 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2062 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2063 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2064 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2065 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2067 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2068 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2069 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2072 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2076 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2077 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2079 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2080 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2081 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2083 ** Improved robustness
2085 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2086 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2087 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2090 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2094 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2095 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2096 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2097 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2098 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2100 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2104 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2107 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2111 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2112 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2113 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2114 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2116 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2117 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2119 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2120 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2121 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2124 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2126 ** Improved robustness
2128 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2129 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2131 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2132 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2133 or NFS-mounted partition.
2135 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2136 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2140 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2141 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2142 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2143 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2144 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2145 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2147 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2148 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2150 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2151 or neglect to report file removal.
2153 For the "groups" command:
2155 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2156 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2158 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2160 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2162 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2166 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2167 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2170 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2172 ** Changes in behavior
2174 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2175 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2176 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2177 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2179 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2180 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2181 a final './' or '../' component.
2183 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2184 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2185 this only for pipes.
2187 ** Infrastructure changes
2189 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2190 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2191 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2192 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2196 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2197 name is "." or "..".
2199 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2200 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2201 dirent.d_type support.
2203 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2204 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2206 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2207 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2208 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2209 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2212 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2214 ** Changes in behavior
2216 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2220 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2221 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2225 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2226 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2227 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2229 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2230 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2232 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2233 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2235 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2237 ** Improved robustness
2239 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2240 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2241 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2243 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2244 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2247 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2248 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2250 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2251 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2253 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2254 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2256 ** Changes in behavior
2258 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2259 where the two are distinct.
2261 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2262 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2263 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2264 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2265 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2266 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2267 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2268 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2269 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2270 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2271 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2272 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2273 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2274 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2275 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2276 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2277 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2279 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2280 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2281 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2283 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2284 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2285 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2286 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2289 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2290 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2294 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2295 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2296 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2297 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2299 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2300 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2301 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2303 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2304 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2305 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2306 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2307 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2310 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2311 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2313 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2314 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2315 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2316 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2318 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2319 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2320 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2322 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2323 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2324 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2325 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2327 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2328 and sticky) with the -m option.
2330 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2331 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2332 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2333 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2334 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2336 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2337 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2339 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2343 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2344 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2345 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2346 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2348 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2350 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2352 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2353 silently ignoring one of them.
2355 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2356 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2357 containing this change was 5.92.
2359 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2360 automatically newline terminated.
2362 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2363 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2364 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2365 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2368 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2369 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2370 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2373 ** Scheduled for removal
2375 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2376 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2378 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2379 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2380 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2381 command to unlink a directory.
2383 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2384 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2385 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2386 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2390 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2391 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2392 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2393 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2394 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2395 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2399 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2400 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2402 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2404 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2405 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2406 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2408 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2409 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2412 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2413 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2415 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2416 list directories before files.
2418 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2419 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2420 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2421 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2424 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2426 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2428 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2429 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2430 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2432 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2433 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2437 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2438 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2439 usually printing nothing.
2441 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2443 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2444 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2445 them with hard-linked directories.
2447 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2448 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2449 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2451 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2452 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2453 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2455 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2458 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2459 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2461 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2462 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2464 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2465 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2467 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2468 all command-line arguments.
2470 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2472 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2474 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2475 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2477 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2479 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2480 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2481 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2482 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2483 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2485 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2486 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2488 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2489 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2490 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2491 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2493 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2495 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2499 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2500 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2502 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2503 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2505 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2506 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2508 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2509 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2511 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2512 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2514 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2516 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2517 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2518 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2521 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2523 ** Build-related bug fixes
2525 installing .mo files would fail
2528 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2532 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2534 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2537 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2541 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2542 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2546 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2548 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2549 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2551 ** Deprecated options
2553 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2554 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2556 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2560 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2562 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2563 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2564 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2565 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2567 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2570 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2576 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2581 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2583 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2585 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2586 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2587 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2589 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2590 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2591 problematic usages. These include:
2593 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2594 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2595 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2596 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2597 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2598 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2599 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2600 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2601 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2603 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2604 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2606 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2607 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2608 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2609 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2611 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2612 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2613 between binary and text files.
2615 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2619 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2623 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2624 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2626 head tac tail tee tr
2627 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2629 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2630 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2632 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2633 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2634 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2636 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2638 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2640 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2641 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2642 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2646 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2648 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2649 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2651 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2652 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2653 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2657 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2658 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2662 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2663 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2664 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2668 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2669 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2673 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2675 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2677 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2681 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2682 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2683 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2685 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2686 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2687 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2688 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2689 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2691 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2695 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2696 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2697 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2699 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2701 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2702 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2703 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2704 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2706 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2708 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2709 rather than silently wrapping around.
2711 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2712 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2714 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2715 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2717 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2718 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2719 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2720 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2722 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2724 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2726 ** Improved robustness
2728 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2729 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2730 no matter how large the result.
2732 ** Improved portability
2734 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2735 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2737 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2739 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2740 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2741 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2743 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2744 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2748 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2749 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2751 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2753 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2754 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2755 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2756 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2758 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2759 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2761 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2762 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2763 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2765 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2767 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2768 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2770 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2771 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2773 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2775 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2776 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2778 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2779 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2781 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2782 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2783 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2785 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2787 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2789 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2793 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2795 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2796 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2797 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2799 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2800 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2802 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2803 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2804 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2806 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2807 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2809 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2810 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2811 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2812 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2814 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2815 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2817 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2818 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2819 the file system does not support it.
2821 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2823 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2824 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2826 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2828 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2829 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2831 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2832 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2833 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2834 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2836 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2837 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2840 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2841 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2842 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2843 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2845 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2846 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2847 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2848 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2850 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2851 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2853 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2855 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2856 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2857 reporting incorrect results.
2861 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2862 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2864 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2867 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2869 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2870 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2872 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2873 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2875 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2878 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2879 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2880 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2881 the file name does not look like a page range.
2883 printf has several changes:
2885 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2886 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2888 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2889 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2890 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2892 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2893 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2896 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2897 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2899 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2900 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2902 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2904 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2905 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2907 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2909 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2911 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2912 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2913 when first encountering the directory.
2917 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2918 output; POSIX requires this.
2920 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2921 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2923 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2925 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2926 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2928 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2929 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2931 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2932 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2933 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2934 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2935 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2936 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2937 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2939 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2940 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2941 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2943 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2944 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2946 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2948 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2950 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2951 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2952 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2953 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2955 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2959 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2960 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2961 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2962 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2963 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2965 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2966 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2967 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2969 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2970 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2972 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2973 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2975 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2976 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2977 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2978 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2979 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2981 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2982 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2984 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2985 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2987 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2989 nocreat do not create the output file
2990 excl fail if the output file already exists
2991 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2992 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2994 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2996 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2997 direct use direct I/O for data
2998 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2999 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3000 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3001 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3002 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3004 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3006 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3007 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3010 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3011 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3012 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3013 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3014 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3015 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3017 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3018 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3020 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3023 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3025 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3027 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3028 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3030 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3031 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3032 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3034 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3035 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3036 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3038 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3040 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3041 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3043 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3044 for compatibility with bash.
3046 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3048 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3049 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3050 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3051 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3053 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3054 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3056 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3057 ls supports TABSIZE.
3058 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3059 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3060 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3062 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3065 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3067 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3068 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3069 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3070 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3071 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3072 an offset, not as a file name.
3074 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3075 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3077 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3078 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3080 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3081 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3083 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3084 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3085 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3087 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3088 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3090 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3091 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3095 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3097 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3099 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3103 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3104 or more arguments between partitions.
3106 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3107 holes in the destination.
3109 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3110 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3111 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3112 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3113 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3114 terminates immediately.
3116 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3118 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3120 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3121 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3122 not the empty string.
3124 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3125 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3129 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3130 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3131 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3134 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3141 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3145 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3146 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3148 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3149 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3151 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3152 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3153 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3156 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3160 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3161 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3163 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3164 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3166 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3167 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3168 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3170 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3172 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3175 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3177 ** Configuration option
3179 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3180 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3184 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3185 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3189 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3190 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3191 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3194 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3195 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3196 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3197 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3198 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3199 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3200 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3203 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3207 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3208 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3209 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3211 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3212 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3214 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3216 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3217 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3218 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3219 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3221 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3223 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3224 not just the ones that reference directories
3226 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3227 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3229 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3230 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3231 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3233 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3234 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3235 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3236 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3237 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3238 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3240 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3245 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3246 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3248 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3250 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3252 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3254 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3255 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3257 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3258 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3260 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3262 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3266 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3268 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3270 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3271 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3272 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3273 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3274 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3276 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3277 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3279 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3280 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3282 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3283 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3285 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3286 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3287 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3291 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3292 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3293 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3294 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3295 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3296 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3297 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3298 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3299 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3300 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3301 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3302 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3303 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3304 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3306 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3308 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3309 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3311 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3313 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3315 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3316 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3318 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3320 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3321 without a trailing newline.
3323 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3324 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3326 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3329 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3333 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3335 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3337 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3338 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3339 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3340 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3342 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3344 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3345 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3346 be printed without leading spaces.
3348 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3349 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3354 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3355 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3356 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3358 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3360 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3361 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3363 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3364 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3366 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3367 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3369 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3371 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3373 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3375 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3376 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3378 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3380 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3382 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3383 byte offsets are specified.
3386 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3389 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3392 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3393 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3394 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3395 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3396 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3397 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3398 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3399 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3400 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3401 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3402 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3403 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3404 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3405 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3406 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3407 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3408 directory where M has write access.
3409 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3410 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3411 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3414 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3415 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3416 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3417 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3418 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3419 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3420 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3421 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3422 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3423 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3424 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3425 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3426 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3427 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3428 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3429 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3430 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3431 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3432 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3433 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3434 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3435 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3436 appeared one additional time.
3438 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3439 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3440 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3441 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3444 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3445 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3446 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3447 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3448 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3449 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3450 if there were more than 338.
3452 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3453 - false --help now exits nonzero
3456 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3457 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3458 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3459 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3462 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3463 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3464 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3465 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3466 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3469 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3470 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3471 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3472 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3473 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3474 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3475 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3478 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3479 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3480 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3481 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3482 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3483 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3485 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3486 under certain unusual conditions
3487 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3488 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3491 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3492 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3493 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3494 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3495 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3496 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3497 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3498 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3499 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3500 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3501 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3502 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3503 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3504 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3505 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3506 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3509 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3510 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3513 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3514 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3515 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3516 involving hard-linked directories
3517 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3518 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3519 character-special and block files
3522 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3523 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3524 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3525 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3526 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3527 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3528 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3529 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3530 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3532 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3533 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3534 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3535 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3536 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3537 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3538 specified on the command line.
3539 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3540 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3541 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3542 the first file untouched.
3543 * readlink: new program
3544 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3545 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3546 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3547 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3548 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3549 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3552 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3553 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3554 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3555 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3556 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3557 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3558 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3559 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3560 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3561 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3562 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3563 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3565 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3566 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3567 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3569 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3570 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3571 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3572 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3573 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3574 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3575 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3576 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3579 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3580 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3583 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3584 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3585 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3586 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3587 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3588 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3589 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3592 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3593 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3595 ========================================================================
3596 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3597 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3600 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3602 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3603 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3604 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3605 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3606 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3607 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3608 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3609 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3610 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3611 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3612 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3613 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3615 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3616 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3617 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3618 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3620 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3623 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3625 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3626 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3627 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3628 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3629 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3630 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3631 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3634 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3635 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3636 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3637 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3638 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3639 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3640 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3641 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3642 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3643 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3644 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3645 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3646 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3647 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3648 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3649 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3651 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3652 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3654 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3655 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3656 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3657 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3658 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3659 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3661 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3662 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3663 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3664 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3665 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3666 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3667 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3669 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3670 the source files in the following example:
3671 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3672 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3673 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3674 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3675 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3676 links between source files with --preserve=links
3677 * cp accepts new options:
3678 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3679 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3680 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3681 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3682 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3683 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3684 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3685 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3686 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3688 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3689 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3690 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3691 even though it's older than dest.
3692 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3693 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3694 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3695 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3696 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3698 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3699 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3700 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3701 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3702 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3703 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3704 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3706 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3707 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3708 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3710 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3711 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3712 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3713 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3714 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3715 This is the default.
3717 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3718 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3719 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3720 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3721 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3723 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3726 ========================================================================
3727 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3728 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3731 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3732 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3734 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3735 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3736 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3737 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3738 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3740 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3741 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3742 that specifies a non-directory
3745 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3746 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3747 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3748 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3749 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3750 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3751 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3752 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3753 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3754 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3755 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3756 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3757 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3758 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3759 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3760 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3761 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3762 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3763 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3764 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3765 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3766 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3767 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3768 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3770 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3771 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3772 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3774 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3776 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3777 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3779 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3780 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3781 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3782 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3783 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3785 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3786 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3787 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3788 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3789 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3791 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3793 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3794 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3795 * still more portability fixes
3796 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3797 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3799 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3801 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3803 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3805 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3806 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3807 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3808 there is any time remaining
3809 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3811 ========================================================================
3812 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3813 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3815 This package began as the union of the following:
3816 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3818 ========================================================================
3820 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3822 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3823 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3824 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3825 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3826 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3827 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.