1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
8 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
11 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
12 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
14 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
16 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
17 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
18 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
20 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
21 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
22 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
24 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
25 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
26 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
27 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
29 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
30 from the source, when copying across file systems.
31 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
33 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
34 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
35 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
37 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
38 would immediately exit when such a file is inaccessible during the initial
40 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
44 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
47 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
48 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
50 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
51 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
52 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
54 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
55 unique groups with empty lines.
57 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
58 used to identify the split points.
60 shuf accepts a new option: --repetitions (-r), to allow repetitions
61 of input items in the permuted output.
63 ** Changes in behavior
65 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
66 not just the transfer counts.
68 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
69 as per the documented interface.
73 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
74 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
75 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
76 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
78 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
79 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
80 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
82 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
83 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
87 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
90 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
94 numfmt: reformat numbers
98 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
99 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
100 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
102 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
103 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
104 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
108 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
109 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
111 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
112 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
115 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
116 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
117 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
119 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
120 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
121 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
123 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
124 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
125 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
127 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
128 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
129 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
131 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
134 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
135 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
137 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
138 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
139 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
141 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
142 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
143 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
145 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
146 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
147 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
149 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
150 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
151 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
152 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
154 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
155 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
156 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
158 ** Changes in behavior
160 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
161 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
162 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
163 'total' in the target column.
165 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
166 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
167 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
169 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
170 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
174 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
175 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
177 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
178 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
180 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
184 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
185 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
186 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
187 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
188 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
189 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
190 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
191 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
192 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
193 for a patched distribution package.
195 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
196 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
198 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
199 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
200 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
201 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
204 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
208 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
210 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
211 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
212 sha384sum and sha512sum.
216 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
217 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
218 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
219 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
222 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
223 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
225 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
226 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
227 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
228 eventually exits nonzero.
230 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
231 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
232 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
233 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
234 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
236 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
237 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
238 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
240 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
241 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
242 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
244 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
245 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
246 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
248 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
249 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
250 Before, this would infloop:
251 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
252 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
254 ** Changes in behavior
256 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
260 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
261 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
262 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
263 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
264 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
267 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
268 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
269 format-changing options.
271 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
272 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
273 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
274 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
275 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
279 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
280 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
281 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
282 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
283 are run without following the instructions in README.
285 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
286 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
287 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
288 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
289 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
290 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
291 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
294 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
298 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
299 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
300 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
301 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
303 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
304 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
305 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
306 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
308 sort -u could read freed memory.
309 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
310 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
311 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
315 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
316 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
317 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
318 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
321 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
325 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
326 processes will not intersperse their output.
327 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
329 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
330 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
331 date: invalid date '\260'
332 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
334 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
335 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
336 lines output by df, can work reliably.
337 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
339 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
340 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
341 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
343 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
344 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
345 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
346 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
347 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
348 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
350 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
353 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
354 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
356 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
357 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
358 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
360 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
361 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
362 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
366 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
368 ** Changes in behavior
370 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
371 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
372 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
373 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
374 have any reason to include it here.
378 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
379 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
380 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
382 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
383 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
384 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
387 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
391 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
392 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
393 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
394 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
395 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
396 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
398 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
399 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
400 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
401 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
402 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
403 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
404 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
406 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
407 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
409 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
410 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
414 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
415 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
417 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
419 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
421 ** Changes in behavior
423 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
424 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
425 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
427 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
428 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
431 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
435 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
436 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
437 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
438 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
439 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
440 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
441 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
442 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
444 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
445 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
446 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
447 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
448 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
450 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
451 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
453 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
454 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
456 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
457 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
459 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
460 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
462 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
463 additional static suffix to output file names.
465 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
466 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
467 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
469 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
470 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
474 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
475 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
476 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
478 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
479 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
480 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
481 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
482 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
483 typically still point to one of the hard links.
485 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
486 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
487 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
488 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
489 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
491 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
492 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
493 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
494 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
498 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
499 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
500 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
502 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
503 instead of causing a usage failure.
505 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
508 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
512 realpath: print resolved file names.
516 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
519 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
520 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
522 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
523 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
524 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
525 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
526 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
527 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
529 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
530 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
531 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
533 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
534 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
535 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
537 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
538 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
539 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
540 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
541 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
543 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
545 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
546 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
548 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
549 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
550 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
552 ** Changes in behavior
554 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
555 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
556 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
557 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
558 usually-short referent instead.
560 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
561 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
562 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
563 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
566 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
570 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
571 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
572 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
574 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
575 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
577 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
578 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
582 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
583 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
585 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
586 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
587 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
588 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
590 ** Changes in behavior
592 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
593 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
594 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
598 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
599 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
600 only .tar.xz files is enough.
603 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
607 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
608 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
609 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
611 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
612 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
614 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
615 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
616 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
617 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
618 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
620 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
621 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
622 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
623 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
624 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
625 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
626 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
627 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
629 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
630 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
632 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
633 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
635 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
636 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
638 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
639 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
640 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
642 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
643 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
644 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
645 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
647 ** Changes in behavior
649 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
650 when -v or -c specified.
652 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
653 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
657 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
658 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
659 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
660 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
661 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
663 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
664 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
665 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
667 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
668 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
669 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
670 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
671 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
672 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
673 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
675 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
676 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
677 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
681 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
682 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
684 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
687 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
688 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
690 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
691 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
693 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
694 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
696 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
698 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
702 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
703 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
705 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
708 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
712 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
713 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
715 ** Changes in behavior
717 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
718 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
719 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
720 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
721 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
722 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
724 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
725 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
726 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
730 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
733 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
737 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
738 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
739 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
741 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
742 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
743 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
745 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
746 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
747 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
749 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
750 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
752 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
753 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
755 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
758 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
759 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
763 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
764 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
765 processed portion thereof.
767 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
768 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
770 ** Changes in behavior
772 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
773 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
774 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
776 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
777 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
778 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
780 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
781 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
783 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
784 Use --preserve-context instead.
786 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
789 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
793 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
794 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
795 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
796 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
797 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
799 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
800 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
802 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
803 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
804 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
806 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
807 reject file names invalid for that file system.
809 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
810 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
814 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
815 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
816 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
817 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
818 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
819 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
820 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
821 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
823 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
824 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
825 the same number of fields are output for each line.
827 ** Changes in behavior
829 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
830 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
831 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
834 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
838 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
839 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
840 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
843 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
847 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
848 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
850 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
851 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
853 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
854 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
856 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
857 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
858 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
859 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
861 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
862 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
864 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
865 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
866 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
868 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
870 ** Changes in behavior
872 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
873 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
874 to the number of available processors.
878 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
881 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
885 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
886 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
887 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
888 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
890 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
891 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
892 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
894 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
895 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
897 ** Changes in behavior
899 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
900 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
902 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
903 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
904 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
905 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
906 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
907 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
909 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
910 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
911 the same way as the others.
913 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
914 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
917 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
921 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
922 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
923 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
925 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
926 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
928 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
929 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
930 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
932 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
933 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
935 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
936 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
938 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
939 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
940 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
942 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
943 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
944 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
945 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
949 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
950 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
952 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
955 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
956 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
958 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
960 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
961 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
962 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
964 ** Changes in behavior
966 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
967 rather than its aliased target.
969 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
970 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
971 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
973 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
974 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
975 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
976 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
977 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
978 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
979 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
980 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
982 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
984 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
986 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
987 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
990 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
991 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
992 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
993 control like taskset for example.
995 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
997 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
998 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
999 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1000 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1001 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1002 includes %C when context information is available.
1004 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1005 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1006 rather than a file system attribute.
1008 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1009 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1010 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1011 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1013 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1014 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1015 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1017 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1018 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1019 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1022 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1026 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1027 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1029 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1031 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1032 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1034 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1035 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1036 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1037 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1039 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1040 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1041 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1045 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1046 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1048 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1049 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1050 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1052 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1053 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1054 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1055 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1056 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1057 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1058 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1059 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1060 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1062 ** Changes in behavior
1064 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1065 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1067 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1068 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1071 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1075 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1076 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1077 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1078 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1082 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1083 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1085 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1086 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1087 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1088 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1090 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1091 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1092 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1095 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1099 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1100 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1101 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1103 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1104 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1105 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1107 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1108 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1110 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1111 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1112 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1113 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1115 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1116 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1117 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1119 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1120 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1121 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1122 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1124 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1125 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1126 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1128 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1129 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1130 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1131 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1133 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1134 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1135 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1137 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1138 processes will not intersperse their output.
1139 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1142 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1146 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1149 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1152 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1153 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1154 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1155 the presence of the empty string argument.
1156 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1158 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1159 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1160 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1161 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1163 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1164 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1166 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1167 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1168 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1170 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1171 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1172 and with a malicious user on the same system
1173 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1174 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1177 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1181 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1182 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1183 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1185 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1186 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1187 offending directory and all "contents."
1189 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1190 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1191 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1193 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1194 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1195 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1197 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1198 processes will not intersperse their output.
1199 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1200 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1202 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1203 output the name of the file to stdout.
1204 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1206 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1207 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1208 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1210 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1211 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1214 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1215 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1216 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1218 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1219 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1220 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1221 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1222 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1223 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1225 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1226 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1227 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1228 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1230 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1231 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1233 ** Changes in behavior
1235 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1236 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1237 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1238 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1239 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1241 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1242 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1243 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1244 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1246 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1248 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1249 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1250 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1251 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1252 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1256 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1260 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1261 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1263 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1264 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1266 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1267 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1268 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1270 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1271 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1274 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1278 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1279 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1280 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1282 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1283 to accommodate leap seconds.
1284 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1286 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1287 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1288 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1290 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1292 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1293 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1294 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1296 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1297 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1298 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1299 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1300 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1304 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1305 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1306 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1307 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1309 ** Changes in behavior
1311 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1312 environment variable is set.
1314 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1315 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1316 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1320 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1321 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1322 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1323 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1325 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1326 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1327 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1328 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1332 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1333 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1334 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1336 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1337 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1338 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1339 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1340 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1341 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1342 another improvement:
1344 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1345 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1348 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1352 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1353 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1354 and libraries tested at configure time.
1355 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1357 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1360 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1361 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1363 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1364 printing a summary to stderr.
1365 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1367 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1368 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1369 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1371 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1372 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1374 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1375 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1376 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1377 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1379 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1380 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1381 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1382 which is relatively unusual.
1383 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1385 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1386 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1387 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1388 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1389 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1390 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1391 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1395 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1396 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1397 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1398 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1399 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1403 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1404 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1406 ** Changes in behavior
1408 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1409 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1410 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1411 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1412 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1415 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1419 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1420 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1422 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1423 before data copying has started.
1425 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1426 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1428 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1429 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1430 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1431 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1433 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1434 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1435 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1436 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1438 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1443 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1444 for its standard streams.
1446 ** Changes in behavior
1448 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1449 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1450 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1451 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1452 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1453 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1455 ** Deprecated options
1457 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1458 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1462 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1464 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1465 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1466 a btrfs file system.
1468 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1470 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1471 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1473 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1474 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1477 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1481 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1482 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1483 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1484 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1486 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1487 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1488 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1489 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1490 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1495 make check: two tests have been corrected
1499 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1500 inherited from gnulib.
1503 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1507 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1508 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1509 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1510 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1512 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1513 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1515 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1517 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1518 systems without xattr support.
1520 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1521 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1522 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1524 ** Changes in behavior
1526 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1527 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1528 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1529 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1531 ** Improved robustness
1533 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1534 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1535 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1536 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1537 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1538 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1539 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1540 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1541 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1545 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1546 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1548 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1549 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1550 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1551 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1552 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1555 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1559 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1560 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1561 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1565 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1566 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1567 data was read, or on process exit.
1568 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1570 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1571 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1572 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1573 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1575 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1576 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1577 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1578 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1580 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1581 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1583 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1584 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1586 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1587 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1588 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1590 ** Changes in behavior
1592 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1593 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1594 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1596 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1597 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1599 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1600 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1601 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1604 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1608 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1610 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1611 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1612 install: Never copies xattrs
1614 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1615 from overwriting any existing destination file
1617 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1618 mode where this feature is available.
1620 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1621 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1622 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1623 do not modify the destination at all.
1625 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1627 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1631 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1632 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1634 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1636 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1637 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1639 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1640 processing the first file name
1642 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1643 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1644 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1645 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1647 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1648 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1650 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1651 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1654 ** Changes in behavior
1656 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1657 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1659 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1660 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1661 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1663 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1664 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1666 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1668 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1669 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1670 is still marked with a '+'.
1673 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1677 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1678 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1682 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1683 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1684 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1685 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1686 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1687 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1689 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1690 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1692 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1693 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1695 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1697 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1698 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1699 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1701 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1702 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1704 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1705 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1706 used to factor large numbers.
1708 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1711 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1713 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1715 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1716 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1718 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1719 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1720 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1721 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1723 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1724 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1725 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1727 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1728 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1732 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1734 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1735 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1737 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1738 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1740 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1742 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1743 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1747 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1748 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1749 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1751 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1753 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1754 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1755 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1757 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1758 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1759 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1761 ** Changes in behavior
1763 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1764 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1767 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1771 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1772 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1773 'futimens' system calls.
1777 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1779 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1780 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1781 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1783 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1784 with no USERNAME argument.
1786 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1787 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1788 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1790 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1791 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1792 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1793 number of fields for some inputs.
1795 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1796 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1798 ** Changes in behavior
1800 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1801 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1804 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1808 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1810 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1811 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1812 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1813 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1815 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1816 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1818 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1819 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1821 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1822 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1824 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1825 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1826 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1827 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1829 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1830 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1831 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1832 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1833 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1834 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1836 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1837 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1839 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1840 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1841 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1843 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1844 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1846 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1847 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1849 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1850 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1851 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1852 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1854 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1855 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1857 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1858 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1860 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1861 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1862 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1866 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1867 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1869 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1870 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1871 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1872 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1876 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1877 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1879 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1881 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1885 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1886 which have negative errno values.
1890 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1894 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1898 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1899 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1902 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1906 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1907 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1908 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1910 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1911 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1912 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1913 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1917 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1918 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1919 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1920 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1923 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1927 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1929 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1930 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1931 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1934 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1938 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1939 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1941 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1943 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1945 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1947 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1951 ** Changes in behavior
1953 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1954 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1956 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1957 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1959 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1960 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1961 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1965 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1966 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1967 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1968 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1969 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1970 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1971 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1972 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1973 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1974 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1975 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1977 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1978 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1979 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1982 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1985 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1986 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1987 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1989 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1990 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1991 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1994 ** New build options
1996 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1997 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1998 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1999 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2001 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2002 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2003 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2004 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2005 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2006 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2007 of "make check" fail.
2009 ** Remove deprecated options
2011 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2012 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2013 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2014 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2015 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2017 ** Improved robustness
2019 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2020 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2021 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2022 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2023 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2024 loss of the contents of a/f.
2026 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2027 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2031 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2032 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2033 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2035 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2036 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2037 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2038 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2040 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2041 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2042 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2043 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2044 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2045 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2046 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2047 destination is a symlink.
2049 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2051 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2052 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2054 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2055 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2057 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2059 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2060 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2062 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2063 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2065 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2068 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2069 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2071 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2072 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2074 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2075 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2076 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2077 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2079 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2080 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2081 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2083 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2084 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2085 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2087 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2088 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2089 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2090 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2092 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2093 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2094 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2096 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2097 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2099 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2100 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2102 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2104 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2105 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2106 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2108 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2109 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2111 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2112 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2114 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2115 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2117 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2118 [present in the original version]
2121 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2125 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2127 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2128 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2129 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2131 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2132 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2134 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2138 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2139 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2141 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2142 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2144 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2145 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2147 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2148 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2149 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2150 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2151 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2152 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2154 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2155 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2158 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2159 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2161 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2164 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2165 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2166 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2168 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2169 directory is unreadable.
2171 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2172 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2173 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2175 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2176 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2177 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2178 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2179 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2182 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2183 Before it would print nothing.
2185 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2187 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2188 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2189 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2190 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2191 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2192 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2193 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2194 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2196 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2200 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2201 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2202 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2204 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2205 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2206 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2207 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2210 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2214 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2215 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2216 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2217 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2218 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2219 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2220 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2222 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2223 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2224 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2225 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2226 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2227 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2228 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2229 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2231 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2232 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2233 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2236 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2240 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2241 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2243 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2244 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2245 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2247 ** Improved robustness
2249 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2250 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2251 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2254 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2258 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2259 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2260 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2261 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2262 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2264 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2268 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2271 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2275 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2276 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2277 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2278 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2280 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2281 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2283 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2284 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2285 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2288 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2290 ** Improved robustness
2292 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2293 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2295 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2296 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2297 or NFS-mounted partition.
2299 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2300 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2304 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2305 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2306 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2307 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2308 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2309 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2311 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2312 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2314 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2315 or neglect to report file removal.
2317 For the "groups" command:
2319 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2320 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2322 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2324 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2326 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2330 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2331 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2334 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2336 ** Changes in behavior
2338 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2339 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2340 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2341 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2343 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2344 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2345 a final './' or '../' component.
2347 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2348 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2349 this only for pipes.
2351 ** Infrastructure changes
2353 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2354 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2355 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2356 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2360 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2361 name is "." or "..".
2363 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2364 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2365 dirent.d_type support.
2367 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2368 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2370 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2371 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2372 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2373 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2376 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2378 ** Changes in behavior
2380 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2384 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2385 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2389 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2390 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2391 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2393 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2394 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2396 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2397 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2399 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2401 ** Improved robustness
2403 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2404 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2405 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2407 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2408 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2411 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2412 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2414 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2415 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2417 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2418 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2420 ** Changes in behavior
2422 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2423 where the two are distinct.
2425 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2426 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2427 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2428 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2429 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2430 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2431 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2432 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2433 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2434 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2435 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2436 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2437 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2438 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2439 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2440 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2441 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2443 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2444 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2445 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2447 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2448 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2449 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2450 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2453 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2454 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2458 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2459 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2460 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2461 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2463 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2464 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2465 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2467 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2468 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2469 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2470 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2471 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2474 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2475 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2477 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2478 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2479 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2480 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2482 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2483 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2484 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2486 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2487 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2488 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2489 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2491 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2492 and sticky) with the -m option.
2494 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2495 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2496 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2497 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2498 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2500 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2501 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2503 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2507 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2508 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2509 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2510 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2512 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2514 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2516 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2517 silently ignoring one of them.
2519 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2520 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2521 containing this change was 5.92.
2523 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2524 automatically newline terminated.
2526 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2527 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2528 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2529 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2532 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2533 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2534 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2537 ** Scheduled for removal
2539 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2540 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2542 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2543 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2544 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2545 command to unlink a directory.
2547 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2548 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2549 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2550 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2554 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2555 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2556 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2557 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2558 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2559 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2563 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2564 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2566 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2568 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2569 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2570 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2572 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2573 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2576 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2577 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2579 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2580 list directories before files.
2582 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2583 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2584 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2585 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2588 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2590 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2592 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2593 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2594 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2596 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2597 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2601 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2602 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2603 usually printing nothing.
2605 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2607 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2608 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2609 them with hard-linked directories.
2611 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2612 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2613 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2615 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2616 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2617 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2619 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2622 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2623 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2625 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2626 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2628 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2629 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2631 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2632 all command-line arguments.
2634 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2636 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2638 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2639 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2641 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2643 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2644 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2645 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2646 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2647 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2649 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2650 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2652 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2653 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2654 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2655 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2657 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2659 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2663 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2664 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2666 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2667 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2669 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2670 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2672 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2673 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2675 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2676 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2678 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2680 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2681 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2682 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2685 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2687 ** Build-related bug fixes
2689 installing .mo files would fail
2692 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2696 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2698 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2701 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2705 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2706 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2710 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2712 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2713 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2715 ** Deprecated options
2717 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2718 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2720 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2724 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2726 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2727 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2728 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2729 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2731 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2734 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2740 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2745 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2747 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2749 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2750 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2751 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2753 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2754 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2755 problematic usages. These include:
2757 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2758 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2759 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2760 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2761 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2762 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2763 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2764 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2765 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2767 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2768 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2770 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2771 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2772 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2773 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2775 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2776 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2777 between binary and text files.
2779 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2783 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2787 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2788 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2790 head tac tail tee tr
2791 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2793 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2794 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2796 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2797 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2798 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2800 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2802 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2804 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2805 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2806 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2810 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2812 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2813 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2815 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2816 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2817 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2821 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2822 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2826 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2827 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2828 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2832 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2833 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2837 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2839 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2841 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2845 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2846 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2847 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2849 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2850 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2851 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2852 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2853 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2855 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2859 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2860 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2861 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2863 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2865 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2866 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2867 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2868 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2870 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2872 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2873 rather than silently wrapping around.
2875 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2876 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2878 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2879 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2881 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2882 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2883 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2884 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2886 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2888 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2890 ** Improved robustness
2892 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2893 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2894 no matter how large the result.
2896 ** Improved portability
2898 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2899 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2901 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2903 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2904 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2905 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2907 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2908 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2912 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2913 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2915 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2917 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2918 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2919 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2920 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2922 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2923 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2925 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2926 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2927 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2929 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2931 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2932 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2934 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2935 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2937 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2939 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2940 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2942 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2943 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2945 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2946 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2947 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2949 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2951 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2953 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2957 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2959 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2960 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2961 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2963 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2964 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2966 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2967 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2968 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2970 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2971 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2973 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2974 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2975 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2976 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2978 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2979 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2981 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2982 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2983 the file system does not support it.
2985 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2987 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2988 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2990 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2992 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2993 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2995 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2996 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2997 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2998 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3000 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3001 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3004 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3005 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3006 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3007 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3009 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3010 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3011 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3012 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3014 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3015 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3017 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3019 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3020 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3021 reporting incorrect results.
3025 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3026 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3028 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3031 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3033 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3034 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3036 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3037 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3039 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3042 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3043 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3044 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3045 the file name does not look like a page range.
3047 printf has several changes:
3049 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3050 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3052 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3053 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3054 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3056 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3057 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3060 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3061 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3063 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3064 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3066 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3068 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3069 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3071 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3073 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3075 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3076 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3077 when first encountering the directory.
3081 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3082 output; POSIX requires this.
3084 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3085 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3087 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3089 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3090 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3092 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3093 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3095 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3096 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3097 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3098 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3099 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3100 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3101 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3103 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3104 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3105 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3107 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3108 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3110 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3112 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3114 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3115 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3116 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3117 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3119 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3123 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3124 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3125 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3126 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3127 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3129 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3130 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3131 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3133 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3134 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3136 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3137 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3139 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3140 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3141 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3142 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3143 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3145 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3146 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3148 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3149 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3151 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3153 nocreat do not create the output file
3154 excl fail if the output file already exists
3155 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3156 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3158 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3160 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3161 direct use direct I/O for data
3162 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3163 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3164 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3165 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3166 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3168 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3170 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3171 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3174 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3175 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3176 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3177 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3178 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3179 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3181 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3182 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3184 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3187 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3189 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3191 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3192 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3194 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3195 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3196 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3198 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3199 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3200 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3202 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3204 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3205 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3207 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3208 for compatibility with bash.
3210 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3212 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3213 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3214 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3215 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3217 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3218 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3220 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3221 ls supports TABSIZE.
3222 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3223 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3224 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3226 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3229 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3231 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3232 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3233 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3234 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3235 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3236 an offset, not as a file name.
3238 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3239 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3241 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3242 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3244 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3245 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3247 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3248 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3249 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3251 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3252 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3254 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3255 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3259 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3261 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3263 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3267 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3268 or more arguments between partitions.
3270 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3271 holes in the destination.
3273 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3274 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3275 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3276 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3277 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3278 terminates immediately.
3280 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3282 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3284 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3285 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3286 not the empty string.
3288 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3289 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3293 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3294 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3295 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3298 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3305 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3309 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3310 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3312 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3313 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3315 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3316 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3317 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3320 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3324 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3325 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3327 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3328 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3330 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3331 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3332 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3334 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3336 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3339 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3341 ** Configuration option
3343 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3344 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3348 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3349 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3353 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3354 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3355 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3358 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3359 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3360 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3361 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3362 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3363 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3364 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3367 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3371 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3372 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3373 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3375 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3376 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3378 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3380 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3381 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3382 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3383 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3385 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3387 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3388 not just the ones that reference directories
3390 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3391 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3393 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3394 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3395 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3397 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3398 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3399 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3400 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3401 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3402 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3404 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3409 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3410 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3412 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3414 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3416 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3418 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3419 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3421 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3422 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3424 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3426 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3430 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3432 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3434 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3435 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3436 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3437 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3438 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3440 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3441 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3443 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3444 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3446 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3447 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3449 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3450 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3451 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3455 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3456 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3457 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3458 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3459 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3460 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3461 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3462 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3463 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3464 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3465 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3466 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3467 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3468 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3470 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3472 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3473 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3475 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3477 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3479 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3480 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3482 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3484 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3485 without a trailing newline.
3487 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3488 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3490 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3493 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3497 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3499 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3501 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3502 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3503 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3504 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3506 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3508 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3509 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3510 be printed without leading spaces.
3512 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3513 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3518 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3519 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3520 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3522 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3524 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3525 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3527 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3528 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3530 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3531 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3533 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3535 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3537 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3539 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3540 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3542 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3544 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3546 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3547 byte offsets are specified.
3550 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3553 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3556 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3557 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3558 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3559 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3560 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3561 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3562 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3563 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3564 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3565 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3566 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3567 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3568 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3569 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3570 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3571 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3572 directory where M has write access.
3573 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3574 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3575 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3578 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3579 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3580 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3581 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3582 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3583 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3584 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3585 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3586 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3587 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3588 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3589 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3590 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3591 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3592 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3593 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3594 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3595 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3596 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3597 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3598 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3599 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3600 appeared one additional time.
3602 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3603 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3604 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3605 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3608 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3609 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3610 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3611 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3612 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3613 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3614 if there were more than 338.
3616 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3617 - false --help now exits nonzero
3620 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3621 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3622 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3623 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3626 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3627 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3628 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3629 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3630 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3633 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3634 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3635 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3636 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3637 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3638 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3639 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3642 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3643 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3644 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3645 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3646 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3647 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3649 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3650 under certain unusual conditions
3651 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3652 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3655 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3656 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3657 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3658 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3659 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3660 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3661 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3662 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3663 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3664 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3665 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3666 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3667 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3668 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3669 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3670 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3673 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3674 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3677 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3678 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3679 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3680 involving hard-linked directories
3681 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3682 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3683 character-special and block files
3686 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3687 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3688 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3689 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3690 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3691 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3692 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3693 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3694 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3696 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3697 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3698 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3699 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3700 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3701 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3702 specified on the command line.
3703 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3704 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3705 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3706 the first file untouched.
3707 * readlink: new program
3708 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3709 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3710 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3711 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3712 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3713 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3716 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3717 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3718 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3719 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3720 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3721 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3722 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3723 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3724 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3725 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3726 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3727 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3729 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3730 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3731 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3733 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3734 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3735 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3736 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3737 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3738 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3739 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3740 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3743 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3744 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3747 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3748 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3749 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3750 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3751 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3752 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3753 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3756 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3757 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3759 ========================================================================
3760 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3761 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3764 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3766 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3767 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3768 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3769 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3770 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3771 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3772 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3773 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3774 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3775 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3776 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3777 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3779 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3780 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3781 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3782 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3784 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3787 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3789 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3790 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3791 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3792 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3793 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3794 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3795 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3798 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3799 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3800 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3801 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3802 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3803 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3804 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3805 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3806 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3807 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3808 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3809 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3810 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3811 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3812 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3813 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3815 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3816 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3818 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3819 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3820 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3821 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3822 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3823 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3825 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3826 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3827 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3828 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3829 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3830 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3831 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3833 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3834 the source files in the following example:
3835 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3836 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3837 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3838 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3839 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3840 links between source files with --preserve=links
3841 * cp accepts new options:
3842 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3843 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3844 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3845 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3846 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3847 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3848 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3849 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3850 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3852 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3853 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3854 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3855 even though it's older than dest.
3856 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3857 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3858 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3859 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3860 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3862 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3863 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3864 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3865 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3866 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3867 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3868 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3870 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3871 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3872 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3874 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3875 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3876 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3877 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3878 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3879 This is the default.
3881 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3882 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3883 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3884 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3885 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3887 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3890 ========================================================================
3891 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3892 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3895 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3896 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3898 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3899 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3900 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3901 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3902 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3904 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3905 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3906 that specifies a non-directory
3909 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3910 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3911 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3912 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3913 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3914 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3915 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3916 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3917 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3918 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3919 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3920 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3921 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3922 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3923 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3924 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3925 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3926 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3927 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3928 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3929 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3930 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3931 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3932 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3934 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3935 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3936 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3938 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3940 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3941 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3943 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3944 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3945 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3946 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3947 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3949 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3950 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3951 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3952 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3953 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3955 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3957 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3958 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3959 * still more portability fixes
3960 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3961 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3963 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3965 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3967 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3969 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3970 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3971 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3972 there is any time remaining
3973 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3975 ========================================================================
3976 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3977 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3979 This package began as the union of the following:
3980 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3982 ========================================================================
3984 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3986 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3987 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3988 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3989 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3990 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3991 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.