1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 numfmt options like --suffix no longer have an arbitrary 127-byte limit.
8 [bug introduced with numfmt in coreutils-8.21]
11 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.4 (2023-08-29) [stable]
15 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
16 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
17 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
19 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
20 presented with malformed checksum lines.
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
23 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
24 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
27 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
28 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
31 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
32 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
34 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
35 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
36 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
37 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
39 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
40 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
41 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
43 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
44 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
46 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
47 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
48 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
50 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
51 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
52 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
54 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
55 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
56 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
59 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
60 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
62 shred again operates on Solaris when built for 64 bits.
63 Previously it would have exited with a "getrandom: Invalid argument" error.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
66 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
67 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
68 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
70 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
71 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
72 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
74 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
75 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
76 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
78 ** Changes in behavior
80 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
81 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
82 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
84 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
85 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
86 checksum utilities with cksum.
88 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
89 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
90 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
91 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
92 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
93 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
97 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
98 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
99 reinstating that behavior from coreutils-9.0.
101 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
102 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
104 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
105 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
107 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
109 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
111 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
112 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
114 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
115 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
118 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
119 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
120 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
121 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
122 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
123 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
126 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
130 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
131 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
132 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
133 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
136 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
137 Previously it may have issued "File exists" errors when
138 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
139 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
141 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
142 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
143 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
145 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
146 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
147 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
148 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
150 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
151 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
153 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
154 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
155 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
157 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
158 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
159 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
160 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
162 ** Changes in behavior
164 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
165 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
166 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
167 due to -n, -i, or -u.
171 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
172 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
173 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
176 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
180 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
181 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
182 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
183 total line in this case.
184 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
186 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
187 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
190 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
193 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
194 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
195 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
198 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
199 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
200 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
201 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
202 which may have resulted in data corruption.
203 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
205 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
206 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
207 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
209 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
212 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
213 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
214 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
216 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
217 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
218 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
220 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
221 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
222 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
224 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
225 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
226 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
227 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
228 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
230 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
231 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
232 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
233 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
234 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
236 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
237 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
238 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
240 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
241 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
242 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
244 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
245 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
246 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
247 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
249 ** Changes in behavior
251 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
252 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
253 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
254 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
255 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
256 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
258 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
259 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
261 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
262 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
263 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
264 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
266 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
267 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
268 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
270 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
271 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
272 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
273 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
275 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
276 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
277 This behavior is now documented.
279 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
280 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
282 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
283 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
284 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
286 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
287 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
288 from errors from the invoked command.
290 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
291 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
292 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
295 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
299 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
300 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
302 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
303 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
305 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
306 print details on how a file is being copied.
308 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
309 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
311 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
312 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
314 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
315 asked to move a file to a different file system.
317 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
318 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
320 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
321 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
323 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
324 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
328 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
329 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
330 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
331 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
332 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
334 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
335 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
337 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
338 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
340 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
341 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
342 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
344 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
345 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
346 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
348 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
349 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
351 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
352 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
353 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
354 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
357 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
361 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
362 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
365 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
366 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
367 before adjusting it to the correct value.
368 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
370 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
371 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
372 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
374 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
375 and B is in some other file system.
376 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
378 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
379 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
380 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
382 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
383 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
385 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
386 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
387 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
388 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
389 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
391 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
392 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
393 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
395 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
396 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
399 ** Changes in behavior
401 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
402 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
403 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
405 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
406 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
407 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
408 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
410 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
411 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
413 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
414 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
415 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
417 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
418 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
420 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
421 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
422 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
423 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
424 though they still work.
426 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
427 capabilities are rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
428 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
430 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
431 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
433 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
434 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
435 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
437 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
438 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
439 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
440 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
444 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
445 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
447 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
448 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
450 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
451 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
455 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
456 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
458 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
459 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
460 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
463 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
465 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
466 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
467 since synchronizing can take a long time.
469 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
471 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
472 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
474 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
476 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
477 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
478 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
482 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
483 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
486 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
490 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
491 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
493 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
494 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
495 is a non regular file.
496 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
498 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
499 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
500 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
502 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
503 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
505 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
506 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
508 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
509 heavily changed during the run.
510 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
512 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
513 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
515 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
518 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstattable files.
519 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
521 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
522 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
524 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
525 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
526 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
528 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
529 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
531 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
532 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
534 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
535 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
536 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
538 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
539 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
540 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
542 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
543 invalid combinations of case character classes.
544 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
546 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
547 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
550 ** Changes in behavior
552 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
553 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
555 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
556 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
557 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
559 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
560 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
561 that was made in release 8.32.
563 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
564 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
565 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
567 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
568 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
570 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
571 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
575 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
576 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
577 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
578 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
580 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
582 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
583 when verifying tagged format checksums.
585 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
587 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
588 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
590 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
591 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
593 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
594 NUL instead of newline.
596 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
598 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
599 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
600 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
604 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
605 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
607 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
608 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
609 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
611 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
612 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
614 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
615 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
617 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
618 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
620 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
621 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
622 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
624 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
626 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
627 where avx2 instructions are supported.
628 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
631 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
635 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
636 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
637 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
639 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
640 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
641 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
642 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
643 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
645 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
646 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
647 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
648 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
649 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
650 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
652 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
653 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
655 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
656 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
657 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
658 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
660 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
661 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
662 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
663 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
665 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
666 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
668 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
669 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
670 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
671 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
673 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
674 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
675 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
677 ** Changes in behavior
679 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
680 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
681 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
682 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
683 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
686 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
687 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
688 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
689 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
690 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
691 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
692 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
693 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
696 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
697 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
698 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
699 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
701 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
702 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
703 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
705 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
706 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
710 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
711 file creation time, where available.
713 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
714 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
716 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
717 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
718 useful on network file systems.
722 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
723 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
725 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
726 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
727 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
731 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
734 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
738 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
739 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
741 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
742 after asking the user whether to proceed.
743 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
745 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
746 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
748 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
749 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
750 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
752 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
753 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
754 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
755 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
756 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
757 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
759 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
760 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
762 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
763 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
765 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
766 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
767 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
769 ** Changes in behavior
771 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
772 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
773 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
774 end-of-options marker.
776 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
779 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
780 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
782 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
783 environment variable is set.
785 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
786 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
787 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
788 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
789 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
791 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
793 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
794 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
795 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
796 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
798 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
799 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
803 id now supports specifying multiple users.
805 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
806 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
808 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
809 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
810 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
811 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
812 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
813 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
815 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
816 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
818 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
819 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
821 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
822 signal handling before executing a program.
826 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
827 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
828 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
832 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
833 which is common in Asian locales.
835 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
836 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
838 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
839 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
842 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
846 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
847 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
848 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
849 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
850 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
851 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
853 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
854 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
855 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
856 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
858 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
859 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
860 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
861 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
862 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
863 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
865 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
866 even if it can't be traversed.
867 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
869 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
870 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
871 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
873 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
874 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
876 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
877 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
878 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
879 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
880 now silently does nothing if A exists.
881 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
883 ** Changes in behavior
885 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
886 it is self referential.
888 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
892 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
894 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
895 each processing step.
897 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
898 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
901 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
902 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
903 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
905 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
906 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
910 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
911 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
913 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
914 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
915 and tail -f uses inotify.
917 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
918 which is especially significant on macOS.
921 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
925 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
926 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
928 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
929 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
930 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
931 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
933 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
934 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
936 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
937 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
939 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
940 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
941 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
943 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
944 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
946 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
947 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
948 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
950 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
951 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
952 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
953 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
954 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
958 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
962 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
964 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
965 rather than reading from the start.
967 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
968 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
969 for unknown long options.
973 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
974 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
977 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
981 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
982 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
983 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
984 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
986 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
987 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
988 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
989 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
990 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
992 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
993 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
994 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
995 now fails instead of losing the data.
996 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
998 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
999 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
1000 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1002 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
1003 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
1004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
1006 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
1007 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
1008 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1010 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
1011 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1012 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1014 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1015 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1016 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1018 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1019 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1020 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1022 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1023 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1024 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1026 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1027 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1028 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1030 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1031 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1033 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1034 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1037 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1038 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1040 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1041 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1042 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1043 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1045 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1046 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1047 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1049 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1050 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1051 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1053 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1054 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1058 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1059 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1060 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1062 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1063 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1065 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1066 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1068 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1069 executing the subsidiary program.
1071 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1073 ** Changes in behavior
1075 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1076 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1077 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1078 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1082 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1084 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1085 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1087 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1088 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1089 is effective in this case.
1092 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1096 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1097 as appropriate for the -a, --preserve=context, or -Z options.
1098 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1100 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1101 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1102 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1104 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1105 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1106 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1108 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1109 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1110 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1112 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1113 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1114 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1116 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1117 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1118 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1119 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1120 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1122 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1123 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1124 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1125 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1129 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1130 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1131 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1132 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1134 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1135 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1136 time zone is indeterminate.
1138 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1139 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1140 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1141 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1143 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1144 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1145 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1147 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1148 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1150 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1151 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1152 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1156 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1157 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1158 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1161 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1165 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1166 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1169 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1170 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1171 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1173 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1174 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1175 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1176 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1177 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1179 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1180 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1181 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1183 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1184 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1186 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1187 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1190 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1191 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1192 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1194 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1195 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1197 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1198 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1199 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1201 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1202 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1204 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1205 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1206 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1208 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1210 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1211 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1213 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1214 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1216 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1217 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1219 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1222 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1223 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1224 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1225 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1227 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1228 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1229 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1231 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1232 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1233 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1235 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1236 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1237 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1239 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1240 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1241 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1243 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1246 ** Changes in behavior
1248 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1250 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1251 values for any argument.
1253 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1254 they are out of localtime range.
1256 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1257 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1258 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1259 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1263 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1264 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1265 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1267 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1268 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1270 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1271 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1273 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1275 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1276 written to a terminal.
1278 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1279 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1281 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1282 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1283 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1284 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1285 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1286 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1287 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1288 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1289 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1290 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1291 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1293 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1294 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1298 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1299 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1303 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1305 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1306 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1308 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1311 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1315 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1316 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1317 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1318 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1320 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1321 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1323 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1324 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1325 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1327 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1328 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1330 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1331 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1332 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1334 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1335 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1337 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1338 that specify an offset for the first field.
1339 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1341 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1342 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1346 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1347 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1351 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1352 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1354 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1355 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1356 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1357 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1358 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1360 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1361 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1362 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1364 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1365 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1366 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1368 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1369 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1371 ** Changes in behavior
1373 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1374 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1376 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1377 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1379 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1380 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1382 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1383 when outputting to a terminal.
1385 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1389 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1390 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1392 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1393 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1395 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1396 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1397 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1399 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1400 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1402 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1403 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1404 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1406 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1408 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1409 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1410 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1412 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1413 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1416 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1420 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1421 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1423 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1424 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1426 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1427 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1428 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1430 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1431 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1432 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1433 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1435 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1436 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1437 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1438 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1440 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1441 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1443 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1444 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1446 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1447 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1448 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1450 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1451 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1452 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1454 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1455 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1456 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1458 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1459 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1460 character at the 4GiB position.
1461 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1463 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1464 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1466 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1467 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1469 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1470 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1471 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1473 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1474 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1476 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1477 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1478 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1480 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1481 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1483 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1484 when those files are being created or renamed.
1485 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1489 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1490 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1491 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1492 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1494 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1495 on stderr approximately every second.
1497 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1498 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1500 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1501 other than the default newline character.
1503 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1504 a useful setting with high latency links.
1506 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1507 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1509 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1510 and output errors in general.
1512 ** Changes in behavior
1514 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1515 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1516 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1517 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1519 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1520 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1521 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1522 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1523 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1525 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1526 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1528 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1530 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1531 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1533 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1534 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1538 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1539 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1541 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1542 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1544 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1545 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1547 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1548 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1550 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1552 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1553 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1554 documentation are provided.
1557 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1561 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1562 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1564 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1565 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1566 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1567 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1569 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1570 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1571 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1572 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1574 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1575 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1577 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1578 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1580 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1581 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1582 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1583 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1584 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1585 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1586 values are in octal.
1599 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1601 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1602 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1603 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1604 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1605 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1606 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1608 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1609 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1610 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1611 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1613 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1614 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1615 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1617 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1618 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1619 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1620 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1622 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1623 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1624 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1626 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1627 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1628 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1630 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1631 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1632 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1633 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1634 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1636 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1637 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1638 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1640 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1641 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1643 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1644 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1645 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1647 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1648 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1650 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1651 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1653 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1654 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1656 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1657 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1659 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1660 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1661 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1663 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1664 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1668 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1669 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1671 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1672 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1673 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1674 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1675 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1676 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1677 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1678 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1679 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1680 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1681 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1682 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1683 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1684 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1685 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1686 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1687 it suitable for embedded system.
1689 ** Changes in behavior
1691 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1692 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1694 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1695 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1697 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1698 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1699 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1701 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1702 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1703 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1707 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1708 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1709 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1711 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1713 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1714 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1715 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1717 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1718 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1719 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1720 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1722 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1723 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1725 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1726 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1727 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1730 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1734 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstattable
1735 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1736 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1738 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1739 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1740 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1741 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1743 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1744 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1745 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1747 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1748 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1750 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1752 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1753 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1754 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1756 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1757 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1758 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1760 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1761 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1762 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1763 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1765 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1766 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1767 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1769 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1770 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1771 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1773 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1774 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1776 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1777 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1778 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1779 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1781 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1782 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1783 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1785 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1786 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1787 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1791 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1792 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1793 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1795 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1796 used to identify the split points.
1798 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1799 command line argument through to the output.
1801 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1804 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1805 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1807 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1808 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1810 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1812 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1813 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1814 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1816 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1817 unique groups with empty lines.
1819 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1820 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1822 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1825 ** Changes in behavior
1827 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1828 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1829 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1830 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1832 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1833 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1835 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1836 not just the transfer counts.
1838 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1840 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1841 as per the documented interface.
1845 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1847 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1848 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1849 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1850 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1852 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1853 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1854 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1855 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1857 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1858 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1859 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1861 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1862 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1864 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1865 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1867 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1871 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1874 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1878 numfmt: reformat numbers
1882 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1883 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1884 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1886 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1887 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1888 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1890 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1891 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1895 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1896 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1898 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1899 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1900 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1902 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1903 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1904 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1906 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1907 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1908 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1910 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1911 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1912 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1914 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1915 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1916 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1918 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1919 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1921 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1922 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1924 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1925 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1926 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1928 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1929 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1930 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1932 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1933 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1934 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1936 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1937 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1938 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1939 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1941 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1942 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1943 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1945 ** Changes in behavior
1947 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1948 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1949 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1950 'total' in the target column.
1952 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1953 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1954 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1956 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1957 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1959 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1960 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1964 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1965 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1967 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1968 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1970 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1974 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1975 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1976 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1977 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1978 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1979 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1980 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1981 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1982 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1983 for a patched distribution package.
1985 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1986 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1988 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1989 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1990 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1991 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1994 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1998 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
2000 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
2001 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
2002 sha384sum and sha512sum.
2006 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
2007 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
2008 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
2009 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
2010 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2012 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2013 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2015 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2016 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2017 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2018 eventually exits nonzero.
2020 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2021 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2022 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2023 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2024 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2026 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2027 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2028 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2030 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2031 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2032 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2034 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2035 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2036 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2038 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2039 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2040 Before, this would infloop:
2041 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2042 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2044 ** Changes in behavior
2046 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2050 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2051 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2052 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2053 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2054 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2057 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2058 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2059 format-changing options.
2061 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2062 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2063 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2064 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2065 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2069 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2070 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2071 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2072 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2073 are run without following the instructions in README.
2075 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2076 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2077 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2078 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2079 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2080 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2081 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2084 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2088 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2089 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2090 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2091 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2093 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2094 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2095 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2096 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2098 sort -u could read freed memory.
2099 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2100 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2101 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2105 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2106 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2107 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2108 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2111 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2115 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2116 processes will not intersperse their output.
2117 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2119 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2120 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2121 date: invalid date '\260'
2122 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2124 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2125 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2126 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2127 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2129 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2130 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2131 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2133 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2134 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2135 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2136 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2137 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2138 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2140 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2143 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2144 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2146 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2147 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2148 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2150 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2151 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2152 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2156 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2158 ** Changes in behavior
2160 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2161 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2162 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2163 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2164 have any reason to include it here.
2168 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2169 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2170 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2172 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2173 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2174 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2177 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2181 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2182 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2183 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2184 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2185 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2186 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2188 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2189 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2190 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2191 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2192 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2193 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2194 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2196 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2197 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2199 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2200 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2204 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2205 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2207 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2209 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2211 ** Changes in behavior
2213 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2214 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2215 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2217 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2218 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2221 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2225 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2226 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2227 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2228 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2229 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2230 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2231 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2232 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2234 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2235 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2236 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2237 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2238 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2240 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2241 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2243 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2244 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2246 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2247 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2249 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2250 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2252 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2253 additional static suffix to output file names.
2255 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2256 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2257 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2259 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2260 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2264 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2265 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2266 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2268 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2269 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2270 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2271 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2272 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2273 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2275 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2276 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2277 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2278 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2279 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2281 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2282 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2283 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2284 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2288 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2289 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2290 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2292 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2293 instead of causing a usage failure.
2295 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2298 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2302 realpath: print resolved file names.
2306 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2307 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2309 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2310 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2312 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2313 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2314 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2315 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2316 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2317 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2319 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2320 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2321 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2323 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2324 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2325 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2327 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2328 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2329 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2330 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2331 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2333 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2335 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2336 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2338 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2339 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2340 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2342 ** Changes in behavior
2344 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2345 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2346 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2347 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2348 usually-short referent instead.
2350 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2351 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2352 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2353 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2356 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2360 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2361 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2362 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2364 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2365 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2367 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2368 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2372 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2373 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2375 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2376 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2377 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2378 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2380 ** Changes in behavior
2382 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2383 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2384 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2388 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2389 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2390 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2393 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2397 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2398 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2399 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2401 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2402 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2404 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2405 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2406 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2407 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2408 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2410 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2411 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2412 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2413 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2414 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2415 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2416 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2417 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2419 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2420 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2422 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2423 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2425 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2426 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2428 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2429 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2430 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2432 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2433 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2434 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2435 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2437 ** Changes in behavior
2439 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2440 when -v or -c specified.
2442 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2443 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2447 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2448 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2449 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2450 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2451 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2453 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2454 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2455 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2457 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2458 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2459 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2460 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2461 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2462 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2463 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2465 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2466 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2467 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2471 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2472 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2474 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2477 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2478 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2480 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2481 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2483 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2484 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2486 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2488 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2492 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2493 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2495 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2498 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2502 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2503 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2505 ** Changes in behavior
2507 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2508 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2509 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2510 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2511 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2512 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2513 resolved for 2.6.39.
2514 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2515 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2516 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2520 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2523 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2527 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2528 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2529 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2531 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2532 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2533 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2535 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2536 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2537 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2539 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2540 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2542 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2543 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2545 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2546 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2548 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2549 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2553 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2554 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2555 processed portion thereof.
2557 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2558 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2560 ** Changes in behavior
2562 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2563 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2564 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2566 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2567 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2568 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2570 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2571 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2573 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2574 Use --preserve-context instead.
2576 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2579 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2583 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2584 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2585 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2586 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2587 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2589 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2590 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2592 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2593 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2594 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2596 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2597 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2599 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2600 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2604 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2605 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2606 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2607 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2608 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2609 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2610 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2611 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2613 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2614 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2615 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2617 ** Changes in behavior
2619 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2620 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2621 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2624 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2628 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2629 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2630 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2633 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2637 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2638 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2640 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2641 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2643 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2644 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2646 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2647 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2648 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2649 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2651 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2652 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2654 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2655 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2656 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2658 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2660 ** Changes in behavior
2662 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2663 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2664 to the number of available processors.
2668 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2669 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2670 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2673 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2677 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2678 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2679 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2680 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2682 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2683 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2684 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2686 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2687 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2689 ** Changes in behavior
2691 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2692 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2694 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2695 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2696 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2697 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2698 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2699 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2701 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2702 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2703 the same way as the others.
2705 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2706 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2709 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2713 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2714 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2715 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2717 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2718 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2720 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2721 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2722 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2724 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2725 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2727 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2728 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2730 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2731 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2732 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2734 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2735 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2736 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2737 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2741 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2742 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2744 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2747 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2748 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2750 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2752 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2753 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2754 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2756 ** Changes in behavior
2758 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2759 rather than its aliased target.
2761 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2762 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2763 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2765 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2766 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2767 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2768 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2769 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2770 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2771 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2772 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2774 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2776 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2778 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2779 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2782 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2783 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2784 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2785 control like taskset for example.
2787 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2789 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2790 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2791 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2792 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2793 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2794 includes %C when context information is available.
2796 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2797 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2798 rather than a file system attribute.
2800 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2801 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2802 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2803 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2805 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2806 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2807 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2809 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2810 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2811 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2814 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2818 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2819 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2821 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2823 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2824 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2826 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2827 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2828 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2829 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2831 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2832 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2833 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2837 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2838 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2840 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2841 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2842 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2844 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2845 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2846 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2847 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2848 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2849 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2850 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2851 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2852 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2854 ** Changes in behavior
2856 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2857 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2859 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2860 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2863 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2867 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2868 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2869 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2870 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2874 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2875 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2877 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2878 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2879 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2880 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2882 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2883 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2884 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2887 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2891 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2892 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2893 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2895 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2896 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2897 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2899 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2900 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2902 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2903 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2904 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2905 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2907 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2908 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2909 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2911 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2912 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2913 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2914 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2916 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2917 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2918 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2920 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2921 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2922 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2923 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2925 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2926 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2927 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2929 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2930 processes will not intersperse their output.
2931 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2934 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2938 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2939 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2941 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2942 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2944 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2945 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2946 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2947 the presence of the empty string argument.
2948 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2950 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2951 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2952 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2953 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2955 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2956 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2958 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2959 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2960 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2962 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2963 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2964 and with a malicious user on the same system
2965 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2966 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2969 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2973 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2974 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2975 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2977 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2978 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2979 offending directory and all "contents."
2981 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2982 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2983 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2985 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2986 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2987 without capabilities were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2989 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2990 processes will not intersperse their output.
2991 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2992 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2994 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2995 output the name of the file to stdout.
2996 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2998 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2999 call fails with errno == EACCES.
3000 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3002 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
3003 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
3006 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
3007 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
3008 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
3010 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
3011 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3012 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3013 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3014 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3015 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3017 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3018 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3019 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3020 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3022 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3023 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3025 ** Changes in behavior
3027 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3028 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3029 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3030 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3031 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3033 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3034 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3035 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3036 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3038 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3040 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3041 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3042 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3043 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3044 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3048 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3052 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3053 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3055 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3056 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3058 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3059 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3060 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3062 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3063 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3066 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3070 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3071 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3072 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3074 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3075 to accommodate leap seconds.
3076 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3078 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3079 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3080 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3082 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3084 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3085 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3086 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3088 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3089 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3090 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3091 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3092 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3096 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3097 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3098 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3099 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3101 ** Changes in behavior
3103 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3104 environment variable is set.
3106 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3107 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3108 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3112 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3113 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3114 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3115 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3117 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3118 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3119 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3120 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3124 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3125 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3126 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3128 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3129 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3130 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3131 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3132 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3133 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3134 another improvement:
3136 rm -r is now slightly more standard-conforming when operating on
3137 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3140 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3144 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3145 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3146 and libraries tested at configure time.
3147 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3149 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3150 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3152 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3153 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3155 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3156 printing a summary to stderr.
3157 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3159 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3160 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3161 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3163 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3164 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3166 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3167 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3168 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3169 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3171 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3172 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3173 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3174 which is relatively unusual.
3175 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3177 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3178 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3179 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3180 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3181 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3182 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3183 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3187 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3188 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3189 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3190 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3191 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3195 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3196 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3198 ** Changes in behavior
3200 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3201 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3202 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3203 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3204 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3207 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3211 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3212 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3214 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3215 before data copying has started.
3217 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3218 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3220 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3221 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3222 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3223 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3225 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3226 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3227 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3228 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3230 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3235 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3236 for its standard streams.
3238 ** Changes in behavior
3240 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3241 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3242 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3243 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3244 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3245 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3247 ** Deprecated options
3249 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3250 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3254 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3256 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3257 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3258 a btrfs file system.
3260 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3262 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3263 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3265 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3266 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3269 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3273 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3274 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3275 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3276 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3278 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3279 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3280 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3281 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3282 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3287 make check: two tests have been corrected
3291 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3292 inherited from gnulib.
3295 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3299 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3300 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3301 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3302 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3304 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3305 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3307 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3309 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3310 systems without xattr support.
3312 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3313 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3314 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3316 ** Changes in behavior
3318 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3319 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3320 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3321 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3323 ** Improved robustness
3325 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3326 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3327 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3328 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3329 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3330 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3331 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3332 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3333 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3337 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3338 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3340 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3341 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3342 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3343 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3344 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3347 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3351 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3352 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3353 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3357 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3358 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3359 data was read, or on process exit.
3360 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3362 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3363 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3364 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3365 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3367 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3368 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3369 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3370 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3372 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3373 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3375 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3376 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3378 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3379 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3380 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3382 ** Changes in behavior
3384 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3385 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3386 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3388 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3389 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3391 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3392 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3393 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3396 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3400 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3402 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3403 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3404 install: Never copies xattrs
3406 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3407 from overwriting any existing destination file
3409 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3410 mode where this feature is available.
3412 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3413 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3414 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3415 do not modify the destination at all.
3417 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3419 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3423 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3424 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3426 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3428 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3429 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3431 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3432 processing the first file name
3434 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3435 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3436 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3437 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3439 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3440 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3442 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3443 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3446 ** Changes in behavior
3448 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3449 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3451 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3452 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3453 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3455 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3456 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3458 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3460 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3461 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3462 is still marked with a '+'.
3465 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3469 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3470 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3474 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3475 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3476 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3477 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3478 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3479 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3481 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3482 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3484 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3485 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3487 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3489 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3490 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3491 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3493 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3494 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3496 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3497 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3498 used to factor large numbers.
3500 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3503 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3505 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3507 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3508 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3510 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3511 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3512 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3513 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3515 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3516 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3517 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3519 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3520 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3524 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3526 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3527 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3529 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3530 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3532 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3534 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3535 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3539 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3540 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3541 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3543 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3545 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3546 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3547 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3549 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3550 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3551 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3553 ** Changes in behavior
3555 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3556 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3559 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3563 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3564 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3565 'futimens' system calls.
3569 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3571 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3572 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3573 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3575 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3576 with no USERNAME argument.
3578 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3579 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3580 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3582 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3583 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3584 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3585 number of fields for some inputs.
3587 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3588 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3590 ** Changes in behavior
3592 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3593 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3596 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3600 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3602 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3603 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3604 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3605 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3607 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3608 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3610 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3611 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3613 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3614 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3616 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3617 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3618 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3619 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3621 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3622 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3623 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3624 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3625 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3626 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3628 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3629 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3631 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3632 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3633 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3635 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3636 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3638 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3639 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3641 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3642 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3643 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3644 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3646 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3647 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3649 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3650 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3652 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3653 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3654 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3658 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3659 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3661 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3662 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3663 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3664 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3668 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3669 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3671 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3673 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3677 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3678 which have negative errno values.
3682 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3686 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3690 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3691 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3694 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3698 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3699 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3700 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3702 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3703 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3704 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3705 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3709 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3710 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3711 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3712 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3715 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3719 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3721 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3722 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3723 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3726 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3730 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3731 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3733 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3735 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3737 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3739 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3743 ** Changes in behavior
3745 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3746 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3748 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3749 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3751 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3752 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3753 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3757 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3758 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3759 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3760 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3761 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3762 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3763 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3764 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3765 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3766 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3767 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3769 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3770 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3771 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3774 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3777 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3778 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3779 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3781 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3782 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3783 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3786 ** New build options
3788 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3789 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3790 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3791 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3793 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3794 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3795 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3796 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3797 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3798 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3799 of "make check" fail.
3801 ** Remove deprecated options
3803 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3804 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3805 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3806 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3807 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3809 ** Improved robustness
3811 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3812 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3813 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3814 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3815 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3816 loss of the contents of a/f.
3818 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3819 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3823 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3824 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3825 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3827 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3828 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3829 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3830 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3832 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3833 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3834 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3835 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3836 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3837 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3838 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3839 destination is a symlink.
3841 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3843 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3844 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3846 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3847 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3849 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3851 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3852 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3854 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3855 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3857 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3860 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3861 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3863 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3864 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3866 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3867 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3868 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3869 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3871 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3872 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3873 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3875 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3876 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3877 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3879 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3880 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3881 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3882 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3884 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3885 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3886 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3888 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3889 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3891 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3892 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3894 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3896 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3897 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3898 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3900 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3901 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3903 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3904 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3906 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3907 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3909 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3910 [present in the original version]
3913 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3917 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3919 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3920 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3921 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3923 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3924 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3926 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3930 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3931 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3933 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3934 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3936 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3937 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3939 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3940 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3941 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3942 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3943 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3944 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3946 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3947 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3950 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3951 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3953 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3956 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3957 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3958 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3960 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3961 directory is unreadable.
3963 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3964 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3965 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3967 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3968 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3969 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3970 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3971 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3974 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3975 Before it would print nothing.
3977 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3979 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3980 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3981 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3982 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3983 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3984 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3985 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3986 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3988 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3992 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3993 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3994 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3996 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3997 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3998 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3999 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
4002 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
4006 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
4007 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
4008 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
4009 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
4010 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
4011 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4012 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4014 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4015 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4016 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4017 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4018 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4019 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4020 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4021 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4023 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4024 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4025 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4028 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4032 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4033 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4035 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4036 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4037 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4039 ** Improved robustness
4041 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4042 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4043 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4046 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4050 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4051 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4052 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4053 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4054 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4056 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4060 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4063 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4067 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4068 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4069 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4070 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4072 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4073 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4075 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4076 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4077 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4080 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4082 ** Improved robustness
4084 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4085 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4087 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4088 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4089 or NFS-mounted partition.
4091 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4092 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4096 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4097 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4098 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4099 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4100 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4101 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4103 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4104 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4106 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4107 or neglect to report file removal.
4109 For the "groups" command:
4111 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4112 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4114 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4116 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4118 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4122 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4123 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4126 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4128 ** Changes in behavior
4130 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4131 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4132 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4133 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4135 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4136 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4137 a final './' or '../' component.
4139 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4140 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4141 this only for pipes.
4143 ** Infrastructure changes
4145 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4146 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4147 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4148 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4152 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4153 name is "." or "..".
4155 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4156 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4157 dirent.d_type support.
4159 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4160 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4162 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4163 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4164 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4165 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4168 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4170 ** Changes in behavior
4172 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4176 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4177 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4181 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4182 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4183 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4185 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4186 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4188 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4189 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4191 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4193 ** Improved robustness
4195 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4196 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4197 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4199 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4200 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4203 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4204 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4206 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4207 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4209 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4210 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4212 ** Changes in behavior
4214 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4215 where the two are distinct.
4217 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4218 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4219 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4220 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4221 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4222 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4223 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4224 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4225 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4226 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4227 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4228 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4229 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4230 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4231 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4232 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4233 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4235 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4236 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4237 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4239 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4240 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4241 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4242 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4245 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4246 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4250 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4251 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4252 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4253 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4255 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4256 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4257 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4259 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4260 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4261 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4262 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4263 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4266 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4267 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4269 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4270 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4271 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4272 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4274 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4275 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4276 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4278 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4279 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4280 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4281 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4283 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4284 and sticky) with the -m option.
4286 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4287 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4288 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4289 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4290 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4292 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4293 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4295 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4299 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4300 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4301 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4302 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4304 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4306 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4308 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4309 silently ignoring one of them.
4311 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4312 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4313 containing this change was 5.92.
4315 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4316 automatically newline terminated.
4318 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4319 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4320 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4321 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4324 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4325 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4326 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4329 ** Scheduled for removal
4331 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4332 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4334 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4335 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4336 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4337 command to unlink a directory.
4339 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4340 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4341 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4342 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4346 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4347 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4348 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4349 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4350 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4351 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4355 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4356 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4358 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4360 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4361 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4362 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4364 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4365 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4368 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4369 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4371 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4372 list directories before files.
4374 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4375 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4376 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4377 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4380 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4382 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4384 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4385 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4386 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4388 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4389 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4393 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4394 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4395 usually printing nothing.
4397 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4399 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4400 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4401 them with hard-linked directories.
4403 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4404 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4405 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4407 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4408 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4409 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4411 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4414 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4415 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4417 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4418 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4420 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4421 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4423 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4424 all command-line arguments.
4426 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4428 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4430 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4431 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4433 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4435 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4436 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4437 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4438 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4439 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4441 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4442 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4444 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4445 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4446 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4447 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4449 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4451 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4455 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4456 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4458 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4459 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4461 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4462 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4464 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4465 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4467 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4468 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4470 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4472 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4473 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4474 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4477 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4479 ** Build-related bug fixes
4481 installing .mo files would fail
4484 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4488 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4490 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4493 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4497 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4498 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4502 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4504 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4505 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4507 ** Deprecated options
4509 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4510 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4512 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4516 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4518 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4519 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4520 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4521 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4523 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4526 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4532 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4537 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4539 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4541 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4542 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4543 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4545 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4546 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4547 problematic usages. These include:
4549 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4550 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4551 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4552 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4553 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4554 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4555 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4556 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4557 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4559 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4560 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4562 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4563 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4564 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4565 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4567 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4568 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4569 between binary and text files.
4571 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4575 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4579 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4580 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4582 head tac tail tee tr
4583 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4585 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4586 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4588 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4589 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4590 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4592 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4594 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4596 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4597 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4598 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4602 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4604 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4605 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4607 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4608 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4609 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4613 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4614 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4618 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4619 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4620 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4624 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4625 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4629 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4631 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4633 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4637 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4638 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4639 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4641 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4642 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4643 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4644 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4645 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4647 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4651 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4652 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4653 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4655 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4657 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4658 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4659 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4660 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4662 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4664 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4665 rather than silently wrapping around.
4667 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4668 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4670 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4671 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4673 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4674 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4675 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4676 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4678 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4680 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4682 ** Improved robustness
4684 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4685 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4686 no matter how large the result.
4688 ** Improved portability
4690 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4691 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4693 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4695 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4696 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4697 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4699 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4700 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4704 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4705 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4707 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4709 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4710 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4711 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4712 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4714 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4715 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4717 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4718 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4719 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4721 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4723 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4724 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4726 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4727 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4729 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4731 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4732 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4734 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4735 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4737 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4738 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4739 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4741 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4743 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4745 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4749 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4751 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4752 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4753 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4755 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4756 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4758 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4759 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4760 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4762 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4763 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4765 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4766 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4767 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4768 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4770 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4771 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4773 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4774 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4775 the file system does not support it.
4777 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4779 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4780 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4782 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4784 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4785 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4787 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4788 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4789 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4790 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4792 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4793 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4796 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4797 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4798 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4799 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4801 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4802 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4803 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4804 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4806 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4807 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4809 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4811 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4812 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4813 reporting incorrect results.
4817 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4818 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4820 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4823 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4825 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4826 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4828 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4829 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4831 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4834 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4835 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4836 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4837 the file name does not look like a page range.
4839 printf has several changes:
4841 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4842 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4844 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4845 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4846 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4848 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4849 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4852 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4853 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4855 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4856 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4858 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4860 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4861 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4863 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4865 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4867 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4868 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4869 when first encountering the directory.
4873 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4874 output; POSIX requires this.
4876 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4877 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4879 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4881 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4882 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4884 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4885 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4887 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4888 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4889 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4890 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4891 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4892 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4893 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4895 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4896 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4897 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4899 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4900 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4902 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4904 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4906 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4907 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4908 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4909 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4911 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4915 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4916 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4917 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4918 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4919 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4921 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4922 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4923 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4925 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4926 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4928 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4929 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4931 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4932 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4933 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4934 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4935 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4937 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4938 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4940 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4941 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4943 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4945 nocreat do not create the output file
4946 excl fail if the output file already exists
4947 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4948 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4950 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4952 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4953 direct use direct I/O for data
4954 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4955 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4956 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4957 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4958 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4960 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4962 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4963 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4966 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4967 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4968 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4969 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4970 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4971 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4973 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4974 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4976 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4979 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4981 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4983 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4984 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4986 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4987 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4988 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4990 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4991 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4992 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4994 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4996 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4997 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4999 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
5000 for compatibility with bash.
5002 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
5004 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
5005 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
5006 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
5007 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
5009 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
5010 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5012 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5013 ls supports TABSIZE.
5014 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5015 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5016 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5018 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5021 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5023 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5024 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5025 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5026 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5027 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5028 an offset, not as a file name.
5030 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5031 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5033 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5034 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5036 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5037 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5039 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5040 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5041 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5043 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5044 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5046 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5047 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5051 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5053 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5055 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5059 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5060 or more arguments between partitions.
5062 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5063 holes in the destination.
5065 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5066 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5067 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5068 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5069 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5070 terminates immediately.
5072 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5074 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5076 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5077 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5078 not the empty string.
5080 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5081 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5085 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5086 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5087 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5090 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5097 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5101 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5102 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5104 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5105 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5107 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5108 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5109 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5112 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5116 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5117 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5119 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5120 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5122 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5123 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5124 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5126 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5128 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5131 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5133 ** Configuration option
5135 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5136 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5140 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5141 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5145 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5146 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5147 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5150 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5151 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5152 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5153 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5154 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5155 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5156 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5159 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5163 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5164 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5165 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5167 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5168 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5170 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5172 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5173 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5174 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5175 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5177 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5179 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5180 not just the ones that reference directories
5182 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5183 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5185 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5186 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5187 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5189 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5190 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5191 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5192 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5193 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5194 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5196 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5201 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5202 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5204 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5206 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5208 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5210 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5211 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5213 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5214 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5216 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5218 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5222 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5224 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5226 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5227 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5228 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5229 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5230 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5232 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5233 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5235 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5236 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5238 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5239 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5241 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5242 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5243 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5247 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5248 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5249 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5250 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5251 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5252 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5253 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5254 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5255 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5256 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5257 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5258 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5259 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5260 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5262 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5264 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5265 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5267 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5269 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5271 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5272 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5274 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5276 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5277 without a trailing newline.
5279 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5280 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5282 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5285 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5289 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5291 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5293 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5294 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5295 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5296 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5298 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5300 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5301 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5302 be printed without leading spaces.
5304 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5305 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5310 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5311 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5312 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5314 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5316 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5317 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5319 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5320 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5322 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5323 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5325 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5327 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5329 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5331 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5332 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5334 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5336 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5338 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5339 byte offsets are specified.
5342 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5345 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5348 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5349 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5350 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5351 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5352 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5353 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5354 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5355 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5356 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5357 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5358 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5359 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5360 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5361 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5362 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5363 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5364 directory where M has write access.
5365 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5366 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5367 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5370 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5371 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5372 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5373 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5374 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5375 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5376 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5377 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5378 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5379 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5380 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5381 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5382 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5383 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5384 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5385 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5386 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5387 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5388 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5389 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5390 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5391 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5392 appeared one additional time.
5394 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5395 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5396 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5397 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5400 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5401 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5402 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5403 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5404 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5405 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5406 if there were more than 338.
5408 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5409 - false --help now exits nonzero
5412 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5413 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5414 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5415 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5418 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5419 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5420 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5421 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5422 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5425 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5426 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5427 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5428 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5429 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5430 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5431 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5434 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5435 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5436 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5437 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5438 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5439 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5441 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5442 under certain unusual conditions
5443 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5444 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5447 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5448 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5449 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5450 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5451 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5452 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5453 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5454 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5455 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5456 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5457 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5458 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5459 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5460 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5461 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5462 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5465 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5466 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5469 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5470 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5471 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5472 involving hard-linked directories
5473 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5474 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5475 character-special and block files
5478 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5479 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5480 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5481 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5482 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5483 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5484 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5485 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5486 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5488 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5489 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5490 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5491 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5492 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5493 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5494 specified on the command line.
5495 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5496 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5497 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5498 the first file untouched.
5499 * readlink: new program
5500 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5501 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5502 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5503 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5504 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5505 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5508 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5509 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5510 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5511 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5512 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5513 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5514 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5515 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5516 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5517 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5518 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5519 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5521 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5522 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5523 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5525 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5526 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5527 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5528 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5529 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5530 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5531 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5532 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5535 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5536 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5539 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5540 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5541 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5542 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5543 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5544 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5545 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5548 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5549 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5551 ========================================================================
5552 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5553 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5556 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5558 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5559 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5560 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5561 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5562 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5563 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5564 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5565 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5566 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5567 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5568 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5569 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5571 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5572 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5573 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5574 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5576 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5579 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5581 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5582 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5583 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5584 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5585 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5586 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5587 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5590 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5591 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5592 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5593 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5594 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5595 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5596 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5597 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5598 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5599 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5600 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5601 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5602 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5603 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5604 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5605 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5607 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5608 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5610 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5611 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5612 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5613 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5614 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5615 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5617 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5618 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5619 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5620 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5621 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5622 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5623 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5625 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5626 the source files in the following example:
5627 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5628 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5629 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5630 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5631 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5632 links between source files with --preserve=links
5633 * cp accepts new options:
5634 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5635 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5636 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5637 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5638 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5639 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5640 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5641 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5642 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5644 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5645 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5646 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5647 even though it's older than dest.
5648 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5649 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5650 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5651 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5652 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5654 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5655 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5656 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5657 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5658 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5659 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5660 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5662 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5663 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5664 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5666 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5667 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5668 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5669 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5670 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5671 This is the default.
5673 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5674 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5675 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5676 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5677 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5679 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5682 ========================================================================
5683 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5684 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5687 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5688 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5690 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5691 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5692 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5693 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5694 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5696 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5697 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5698 that specifies a non-directory
5701 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5702 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5703 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5704 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5705 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5706 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5707 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5708 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5709 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5710 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5711 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5712 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5713 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5714 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5715 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5716 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5717 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5718 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5719 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5720 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5721 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5722 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5723 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5724 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5726 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5727 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5728 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5730 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5732 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5733 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5735 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5736 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5737 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5738 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5739 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5741 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5742 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5743 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5744 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5745 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5747 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5749 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5750 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5751 * still more portability fixes
5752 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5753 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5755 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5757 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5759 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5761 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5762 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5763 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5764 there is any time remaining
5765 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5767 ========================================================================
5768 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5769 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5771 This package began as the union of the following:
5772 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5774 ========================================================================
5776 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5778 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5779 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5780 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5781 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5782 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5783 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.