1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
8 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
10 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
12 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
13 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
14 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
16 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
17 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
18 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
19 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
21 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
22 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
23 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
25 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
26 would immediately exit when such a file is inaccessible during the initial
28 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
32 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
33 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
35 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
36 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
37 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
39 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
40 unique groups with empty lines.
42 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
43 used to identify the split points.
45 ** Changes in behavior
47 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
48 as per the documented interface.
52 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
53 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
54 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
55 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
57 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
58 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
59 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
61 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
62 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
66 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
69 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
73 numfmt: reformat numbers
77 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
78 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
79 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
81 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
82 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
83 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
87 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
88 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
90 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
91 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
92 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
94 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
95 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
96 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
98 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
99 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
100 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
102 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
103 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
104 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
106 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
107 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
108 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
110 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
111 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
113 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
114 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
116 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
117 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
118 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
120 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
121 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
122 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
124 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
125 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
126 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
128 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
129 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
130 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
131 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
133 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
134 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
135 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
137 ** Changes in behavior
139 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
140 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
141 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
142 'total' in the target column.
144 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
145 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
146 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
148 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
149 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
153 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
154 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
156 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
157 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
159 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
163 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
164 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
165 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
166 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
167 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
168 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
169 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
170 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
171 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
172 for a patched distribution package.
174 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
175 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
177 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
178 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
179 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
180 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
183 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
187 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
189 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
190 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
191 sha384sum and sha512sum.
195 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
196 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
197 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
198 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
201 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
202 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
204 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
205 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
206 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
207 eventually exits nonzero.
209 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
210 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
211 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
212 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
213 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
215 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
216 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
217 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
219 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
220 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
221 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
223 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
224 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
225 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
227 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
228 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
229 Before, this would infloop:
230 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
231 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
233 ** Changes in behavior
235 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
239 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
240 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
241 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
242 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
243 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
246 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
247 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
248 format-changing options.
250 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
251 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
252 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
253 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
254 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
258 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
259 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
260 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
261 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
262 are run without following the instructions in README.
264 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
265 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
266 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
267 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
268 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
269 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
270 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
273 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
277 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
278 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
279 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
280 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
282 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
283 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
284 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
285 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
287 sort -u could read freed memory.
288 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
289 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
290 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
294 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
295 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
296 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
297 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
300 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
304 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
305 processes will not intersperse their output.
306 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
308 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
309 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
310 date: invalid date '\260'
311 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
313 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
314 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
315 lines output by df, can work reliably.
316 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
318 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
319 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
320 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
322 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
323 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
324 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
325 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
326 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
327 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
329 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
330 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
332 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
333 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
335 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
336 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
337 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
339 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
340 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
341 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
345 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
347 ** Changes in behavior
349 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
350 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
351 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
352 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
353 have any reason to include it here.
357 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
358 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
359 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
361 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
362 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
363 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
366 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
370 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
371 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
372 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
373 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
374 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
375 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
377 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
378 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
379 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
380 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
381 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
382 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
383 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
385 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
386 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
388 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
389 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
393 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
394 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
396 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
398 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
400 ** Changes in behavior
402 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
403 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
404 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
406 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
407 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
410 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
414 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
415 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
416 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
417 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
418 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
419 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
420 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
421 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
423 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
424 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
425 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
426 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
427 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
429 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
430 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
432 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
433 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
435 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
436 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
438 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
439 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
441 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
442 additional static suffix to output file names.
444 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
445 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
446 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
448 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
449 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
453 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
454 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
455 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
457 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
458 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
459 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
460 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
461 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
462 typically still point to one of the hard links.
464 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
465 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
466 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
467 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
468 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
470 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
471 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
472 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
473 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
477 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
478 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
479 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
481 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
482 instead of causing a usage failure.
484 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
487 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
491 realpath: print resolved file names.
495 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
496 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
498 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
499 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
501 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
502 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
503 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
504 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
505 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
506 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
508 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
509 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
510 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
512 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
513 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
516 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
517 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
518 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
519 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
520 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
522 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
524 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
525 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
527 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
528 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
529 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
531 ** Changes in behavior
533 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
534 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
535 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
536 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
537 usually-short referent instead.
539 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
540 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
541 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
542 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
545 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
549 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
550 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
551 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
553 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
554 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
556 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
561 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
562 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
564 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
565 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
566 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
567 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
569 ** Changes in behavior
571 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
572 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
573 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
577 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
578 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
579 only .tar.xz files is enough.
582 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
586 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
587 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
588 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
590 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
591 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
593 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
594 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
595 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
596 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
597 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
599 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
600 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
601 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
602 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
603 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
604 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
605 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
606 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
608 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
609 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
611 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
612 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
614 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
615 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
617 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
618 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
619 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
621 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
622 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
623 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
624 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
626 ** Changes in behavior
628 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
629 when -v or -c specified.
631 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
632 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
636 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
637 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
638 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
639 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
640 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
642 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
643 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
644 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
646 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
647 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
648 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
649 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
650 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
651 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
652 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
654 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
655 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
656 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
660 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
661 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
663 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
666 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
667 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
669 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
670 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
672 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
673 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
675 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
677 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
681 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
682 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
684 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
687 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
691 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
692 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
694 ** Changes in behavior
696 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
697 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
698 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
699 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
700 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
701 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
703 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
704 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
705 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
709 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
712 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
716 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
717 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
720 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
721 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
724 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
725 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
726 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
728 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
729 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
731 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
732 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
734 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
735 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
737 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
738 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
742 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
743 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
744 processed portion thereof.
746 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
747 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
749 ** Changes in behavior
751 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
752 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
753 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
755 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
756 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
757 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
759 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
760 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
762 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
763 Use --preserve-context instead.
765 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
768 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
772 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
773 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
774 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
775 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
776 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
778 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
779 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
781 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
782 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
783 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
785 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
786 reject file names invalid for that file system.
788 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
789 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
793 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
794 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
795 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
796 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
797 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
798 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
799 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
800 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
802 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
803 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
804 the same number of fields are output for each line.
806 ** Changes in behavior
808 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
809 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
810 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
813 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
817 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
818 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
819 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
822 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
826 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
827 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
829 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
830 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
832 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
833 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
835 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
836 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
837 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
838 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
840 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
841 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
843 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
844 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
845 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
847 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
849 ** Changes in behavior
851 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
852 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
853 to the number of available processors.
857 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
860 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
864 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
865 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
866 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
867 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
869 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
870 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
871 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
873 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
874 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
876 ** Changes in behavior
878 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
879 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
881 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
882 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
883 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
884 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
885 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
886 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
888 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
889 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
890 the same way as the others.
892 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
893 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
896 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
900 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
901 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
902 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
904 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
905 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
907 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
908 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
909 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
911 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
912 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
914 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
917 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
918 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
919 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
921 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
922 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
923 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
924 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
928 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
929 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
931 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
934 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
935 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
937 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
939 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
940 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
941 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
943 ** Changes in behavior
945 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
946 rather than its aliased target.
948 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
949 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
950 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
952 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
953 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
954 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
955 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
956 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
957 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
958 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
959 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
961 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
963 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
965 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
966 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
969 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
970 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
971 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
972 control like taskset for example.
974 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
976 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
977 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
978 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
979 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
980 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
981 includes %C when context information is available.
983 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
984 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
985 rather than a file system attribute.
987 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
988 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
989 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
990 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
992 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
993 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
994 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
996 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
997 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
998 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1001 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1005 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1006 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1008 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1010 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1013 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1014 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1015 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1016 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1018 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1019 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1020 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1024 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1025 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1027 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1028 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1029 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1031 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1032 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1033 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1034 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1035 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1036 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1037 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1038 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1039 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1041 ** Changes in behavior
1043 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1044 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1046 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1047 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1050 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1054 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1055 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1056 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1057 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1061 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1062 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1064 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1065 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1066 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1067 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1069 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1070 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1071 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1074 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1078 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1079 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1080 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1082 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1083 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1084 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1086 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1087 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1089 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1090 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1091 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1092 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1094 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1095 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1096 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1098 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1099 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1100 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1101 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1103 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1104 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1105 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1107 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1108 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1109 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1110 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1112 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1113 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1114 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1116 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1117 processes will not intersperse their output.
1118 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1121 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1125 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1128 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1129 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1131 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1132 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1133 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1134 the presence of the empty string argument.
1135 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1137 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1138 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1139 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1140 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1142 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1143 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1145 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1146 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1147 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1149 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1150 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1151 and with a malicious user on the same system
1152 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1153 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1156 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1160 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1161 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1162 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1164 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1165 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1166 offending directory and all "contents."
1168 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1169 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1170 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1172 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1173 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1174 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1176 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1177 processes will not intersperse their output.
1178 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1179 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1181 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1182 output the name of the file to stdout.
1183 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1185 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1186 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1187 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1189 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1190 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1193 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1194 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1195 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1197 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1198 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1199 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1200 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1201 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1202 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1204 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1205 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1206 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1207 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1209 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1210 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1212 ** Changes in behavior
1214 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1215 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1216 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1217 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1218 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1220 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1221 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1222 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1223 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1225 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1227 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1228 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1229 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1230 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1231 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1235 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1239 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1240 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1242 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1243 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1245 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1246 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1247 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1249 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1250 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1253 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1257 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1258 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1259 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1261 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1262 to accommodate leap seconds.
1263 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1265 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1266 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1267 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1269 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1271 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1272 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1273 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1275 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1276 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1277 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1278 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1279 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1283 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1284 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1285 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1286 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1288 ** Changes in behavior
1290 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1291 environment variable is set.
1293 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1294 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1295 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1299 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1300 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1301 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1302 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1304 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1305 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1306 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1307 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1311 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1312 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1313 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1315 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1316 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1317 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1318 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1319 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1320 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1321 another improvement:
1323 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1324 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1327 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1331 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1332 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1333 and libraries tested at configure time.
1334 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1336 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1337 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1339 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1340 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1342 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1343 printing a summary to stderr.
1344 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1346 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1347 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1348 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1350 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1351 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1353 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1354 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1355 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1356 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1358 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1359 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1360 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1361 which is relatively unusual.
1362 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1364 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1365 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1366 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1367 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1368 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1369 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1370 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1374 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1375 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1376 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1377 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1378 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1382 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1383 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1385 ** Changes in behavior
1387 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1388 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1389 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1390 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1391 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1394 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1398 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1399 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1401 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1402 before data copying has started.
1404 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1405 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1407 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1408 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1409 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1410 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1412 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1413 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1414 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1415 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1417 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1422 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1423 for its standard streams.
1425 ** Changes in behavior
1427 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1428 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1429 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1430 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1431 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1432 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1434 ** Deprecated options
1436 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1437 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1441 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1443 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1444 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1445 a btrfs file system.
1447 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1449 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1450 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1452 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1453 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1456 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1460 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1461 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1462 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1463 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1465 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1466 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1467 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1468 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1469 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1474 make check: two tests have been corrected
1478 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1479 inherited from gnulib.
1482 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1486 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1487 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1488 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1489 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1491 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1492 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1494 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1496 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1497 systems without xattr support.
1499 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1500 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1501 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1503 ** Changes in behavior
1505 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1506 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1507 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1508 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1510 ** Improved robustness
1512 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1513 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1514 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1515 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1516 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1517 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1518 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1519 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1520 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1524 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1525 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1527 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1528 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1529 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1530 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1531 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1534 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1538 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1539 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1540 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1544 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1545 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1546 data was read, or on process exit.
1547 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1549 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1550 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1551 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1552 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1554 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1555 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1556 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1557 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1559 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1560 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1562 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1563 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1565 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1566 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1567 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1569 ** Changes in behavior
1571 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1572 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1573 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1575 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1576 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1578 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1579 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1580 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1583 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1587 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1589 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1590 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1591 install: Never copies xattrs
1593 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1594 from overwriting any existing destination file
1596 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1597 mode where this feature is available.
1599 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1600 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1601 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1602 do not modify the destination at all.
1604 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1606 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1610 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1611 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1613 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1615 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1616 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1618 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1619 processing the first file name
1621 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1622 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1623 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1624 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1626 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1627 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1629 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1630 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1633 ** Changes in behavior
1635 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1636 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1638 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1639 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1640 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1642 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1643 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1645 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1647 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1648 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1649 is still marked with a '+'.
1652 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1656 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1657 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1661 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1662 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1663 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1664 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1665 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1666 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1668 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1669 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1671 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1672 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1674 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1676 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1677 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1678 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1680 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1681 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1683 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1684 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1685 used to factor large numbers.
1687 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1690 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1692 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1694 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1695 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1697 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1698 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1699 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1700 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1702 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1703 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1704 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1706 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1707 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1711 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1713 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1714 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1716 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1717 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1719 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1721 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1722 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1726 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1727 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1728 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1730 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1732 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1733 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1734 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1736 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1737 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1738 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1740 ** Changes in behavior
1742 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1743 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1746 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1750 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1751 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1752 'futimens' system calls.
1756 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1758 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1759 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1760 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1762 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1763 with no USERNAME argument.
1765 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1766 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1767 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1769 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1770 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1771 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1772 number of fields for some inputs.
1774 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1775 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1777 ** Changes in behavior
1779 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1780 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1783 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1787 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1789 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1790 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1791 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1792 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1794 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1795 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1797 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1798 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1800 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1801 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1803 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1804 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1805 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1806 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1808 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1809 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1810 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1811 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1812 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1813 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1815 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1816 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1818 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1819 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1820 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1822 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1823 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1825 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1826 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1828 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1829 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1830 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1831 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1833 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1834 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1836 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1837 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1839 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1840 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1841 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1845 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1846 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1848 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1849 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1850 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1851 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1855 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1856 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1858 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1860 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1864 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1865 which have negative errno values.
1869 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1873 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1877 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1878 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1881 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1885 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1886 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1887 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1889 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1890 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1891 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1892 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1896 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1897 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1898 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1899 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1902 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1906 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1908 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1909 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1910 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1913 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1917 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1918 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1920 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1922 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1924 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1926 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1930 ** Changes in behavior
1932 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1933 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1935 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1936 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1938 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1939 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1940 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1944 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1945 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1946 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1947 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1948 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1949 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1950 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1951 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1952 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1953 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1954 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1956 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1957 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1958 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1961 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1964 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1965 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1966 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1968 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1969 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1970 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1973 ** New build options
1975 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1976 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1977 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1978 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1980 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1981 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1982 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1983 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1984 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1985 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1986 of "make check" fail.
1988 ** Remove deprecated options
1990 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1991 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1992 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1993 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1994 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1996 ** Improved robustness
1998 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1999 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2000 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2001 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2002 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2003 loss of the contents of a/f.
2005 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2006 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2010 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2011 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2012 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2014 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2015 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2016 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2017 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2019 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2020 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2021 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2022 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2023 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2024 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2025 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2026 destination is a symlink.
2028 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2030 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2031 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2033 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2034 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2036 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2038 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2039 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2041 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2042 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2044 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2047 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2048 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2050 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2051 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2053 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2054 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2055 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2056 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2058 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2059 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2060 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2062 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2063 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2064 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2066 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2067 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2068 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2069 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2071 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2072 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2073 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2075 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2076 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2078 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2079 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2081 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2083 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2084 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2085 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2087 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2088 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2090 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2091 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2093 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2094 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2096 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2097 [present in the original version]
2100 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2104 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2106 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2107 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2108 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2110 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2111 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2113 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2117 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2118 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2120 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2121 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2123 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2124 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2126 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2127 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2128 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2129 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2130 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2131 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2133 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2134 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2137 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2138 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2140 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2143 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2144 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2145 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2147 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2148 directory is unreadable.
2150 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2151 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2152 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2154 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2155 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2156 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2157 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2158 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2161 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2162 Before it would print nothing.
2164 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2166 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2167 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2168 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2169 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2170 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2171 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2172 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2173 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2175 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2179 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2180 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2181 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2183 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2184 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2185 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2186 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2189 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2193 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2194 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2195 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2196 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2197 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2198 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2199 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2201 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2202 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2203 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2204 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2205 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2206 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2207 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2208 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2210 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2211 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2212 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2215 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2219 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2220 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2222 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2223 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2224 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2226 ** Improved robustness
2228 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2229 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2230 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2233 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2237 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2238 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2239 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2240 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2241 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2243 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2247 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2250 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2254 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2255 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2256 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2257 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2259 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2260 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2262 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2263 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2264 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2267 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2269 ** Improved robustness
2271 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2272 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2274 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2275 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2276 or NFS-mounted partition.
2278 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2279 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2283 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2284 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2285 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2286 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2287 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2288 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2290 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2291 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2293 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2294 or neglect to report file removal.
2296 For the "groups" command:
2298 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2299 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2301 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2303 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2305 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2309 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2310 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2313 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2315 ** Changes in behavior
2317 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2318 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2319 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2320 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2322 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2323 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2324 a final './' or '../' component.
2326 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2327 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2328 this only for pipes.
2330 ** Infrastructure changes
2332 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2333 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2334 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2335 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2339 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2340 name is "." or "..".
2342 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2343 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2344 dirent.d_type support.
2346 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2347 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2349 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2350 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2351 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2352 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2355 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2357 ** Changes in behavior
2359 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2363 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2364 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2368 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2369 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2370 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2372 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2373 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2375 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2376 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2378 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2380 ** Improved robustness
2382 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2383 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2384 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2386 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2387 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2390 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2391 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2393 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2394 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2396 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2397 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2399 ** Changes in behavior
2401 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2402 where the two are distinct.
2404 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2405 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2406 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2407 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2408 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2409 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2410 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2411 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2412 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2413 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2414 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2415 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2416 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2417 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2418 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2419 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2420 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2422 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2423 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2424 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2426 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2427 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2428 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2429 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2432 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2433 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2437 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2438 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2439 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2440 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2442 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2443 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2444 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2446 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2447 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2448 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2449 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2450 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2453 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2454 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2456 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2457 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2458 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2459 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2461 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2462 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2463 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2465 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2466 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2467 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2468 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2470 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2471 and sticky) with the -m option.
2473 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2474 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2475 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2476 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2477 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2479 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2480 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2482 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2486 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2487 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2488 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2489 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2491 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2493 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2495 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2496 silently ignoring one of them.
2498 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2499 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2500 containing this change was 5.92.
2502 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2503 automatically newline terminated.
2505 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2506 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2507 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2508 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2511 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2512 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2513 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2516 ** Scheduled for removal
2518 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2519 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2521 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2522 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2523 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2524 command to unlink a directory.
2526 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2527 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2528 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2529 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2533 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2534 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2535 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2536 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2537 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2538 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2542 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2543 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2545 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2547 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2548 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2549 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2551 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2552 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2555 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2556 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2558 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2559 list directories before files.
2561 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2562 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2563 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2564 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2567 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2569 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2571 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2572 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2573 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2575 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2576 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2580 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2581 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2582 usually printing nothing.
2584 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2586 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2587 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2588 them with hard-linked directories.
2590 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2591 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2592 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2594 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2595 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2596 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2598 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2601 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2602 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2604 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2605 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2607 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2608 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2610 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2611 all command-line arguments.
2613 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2615 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2617 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2618 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2620 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2622 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2623 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2624 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2625 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2626 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2628 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2629 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2631 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2632 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2633 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2634 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2636 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2638 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2642 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2643 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2645 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2646 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2648 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2649 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2651 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2652 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2654 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2655 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2657 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2659 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2660 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2661 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2664 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2666 ** Build-related bug fixes
2668 installing .mo files would fail
2671 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2675 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2677 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2680 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2684 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2685 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2689 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2691 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2692 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2694 ** Deprecated options
2696 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2697 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2699 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2703 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2705 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2706 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2707 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2708 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2710 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2713 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2719 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2724 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2726 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2728 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2729 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2730 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2732 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2733 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2734 problematic usages. These include:
2736 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2737 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2738 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2739 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2740 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2741 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2742 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2743 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2744 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2746 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2747 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2749 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2750 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2751 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2752 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2754 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2755 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2756 between binary and text files.
2758 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2762 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2766 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2767 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2769 head tac tail tee tr
2770 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2772 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2773 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2775 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2776 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2777 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2779 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2781 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2783 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2784 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2785 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2789 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2791 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2792 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2794 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2795 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2796 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2800 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2801 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2805 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2806 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2807 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2811 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2812 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2816 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2818 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2820 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2824 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2825 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2826 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2828 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2829 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2830 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2831 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2832 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2834 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2838 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2839 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2840 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2842 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2844 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2845 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2846 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2847 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2849 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2851 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2852 rather than silently wrapping around.
2854 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2855 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2857 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2858 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2860 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2861 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2862 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2863 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2865 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2867 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2869 ** Improved robustness
2871 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2872 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2873 no matter how large the result.
2875 ** Improved portability
2877 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2878 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2880 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2882 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2883 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2884 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2886 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2887 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2891 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2892 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2894 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2896 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2897 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2898 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2899 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2901 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2902 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2904 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2905 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2906 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2908 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2910 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2911 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2913 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2914 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2916 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2918 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2919 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2921 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2922 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2924 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2925 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2926 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2928 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2930 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2932 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2936 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2938 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2939 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2940 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2942 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2943 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2945 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2946 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2947 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2949 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2950 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2952 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2953 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2954 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2955 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2957 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2958 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2960 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2961 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2962 the file system does not support it.
2964 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2966 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2967 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2969 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2971 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2972 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2974 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2975 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2976 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2977 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2979 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2980 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2983 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2984 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2985 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2986 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2988 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2989 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2990 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2991 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2993 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2994 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2996 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2998 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2999 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3000 reporting incorrect results.
3004 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3005 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3007 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3010 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3012 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3013 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3015 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3016 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3018 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3021 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3022 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3023 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3024 the file name does not look like a page range.
3026 printf has several changes:
3028 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3029 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3031 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3032 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3033 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3035 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3036 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3039 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3040 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3042 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3043 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3045 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3047 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3048 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3050 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3052 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3054 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3055 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3056 when first encountering the directory.
3060 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3061 output; POSIX requires this.
3063 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3064 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3066 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3068 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3069 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3071 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3072 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3074 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3075 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3076 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3077 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3078 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3079 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3080 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3082 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3083 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3084 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3086 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3087 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3089 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3091 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3093 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3094 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3095 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3096 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3098 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3102 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3103 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3104 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3105 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3106 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3108 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3109 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3110 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3112 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3113 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3115 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3116 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3118 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3119 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3120 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3121 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3122 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3124 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3125 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3127 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3128 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3130 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3132 nocreat do not create the output file
3133 excl fail if the output file already exists
3134 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3135 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3137 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3139 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3140 direct use direct I/O for data
3141 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3142 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3143 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3144 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3145 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3147 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3149 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3150 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3153 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3154 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3155 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3156 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3157 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3158 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3160 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3161 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3163 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3166 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3168 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3170 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3171 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3173 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3174 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3175 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3177 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3178 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3179 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3181 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3183 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3184 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3186 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3187 for compatibility with bash.
3189 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3191 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3192 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3193 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3194 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3196 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3197 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3199 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3200 ls supports TABSIZE.
3201 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3202 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3203 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3205 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3208 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3210 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3211 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3212 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3213 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3214 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3215 an offset, not as a file name.
3217 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3218 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3220 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3221 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3223 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3224 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3226 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3227 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3228 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3230 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3231 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3233 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3234 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3238 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3240 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3242 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3246 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3247 or more arguments between partitions.
3249 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3250 holes in the destination.
3252 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3253 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3254 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3255 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3256 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3257 terminates immediately.
3259 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3261 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3263 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3264 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3265 not the empty string.
3267 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3268 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3272 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3273 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3274 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3277 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3284 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3288 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3289 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3291 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3292 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3294 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3295 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3296 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3299 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3303 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3304 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3306 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3307 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3309 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3310 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3311 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3313 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3315 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3318 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3320 ** Configuration option
3322 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3323 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3327 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3328 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3332 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3333 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3334 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3337 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3338 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3339 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3340 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3341 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3342 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3343 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3346 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3350 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3351 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3352 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3354 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3355 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3357 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3359 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3360 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3361 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3362 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3364 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3366 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3367 not just the ones that reference directories
3369 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3370 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3372 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3373 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3374 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3376 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3377 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3378 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3379 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3380 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3381 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3383 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3388 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3389 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3391 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3393 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3395 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3397 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3398 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3400 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3401 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3403 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3405 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3409 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3411 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3413 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3414 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3415 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3416 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3417 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3419 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3420 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3422 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3423 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3425 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3426 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3428 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3429 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3430 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3434 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3435 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3436 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3437 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3438 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3439 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3440 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3441 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3442 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3443 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3444 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3445 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3446 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3447 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3449 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3451 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3452 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3454 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3456 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3458 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3459 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3461 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3463 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3464 without a trailing newline.
3466 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3467 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3469 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3472 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3476 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3478 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3480 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3481 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3482 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3483 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3485 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3487 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3488 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3489 be printed without leading spaces.
3491 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3492 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3497 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3498 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3499 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3501 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3503 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3504 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3506 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3507 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3509 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3510 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3512 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3514 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3516 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3518 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3519 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3521 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3523 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3525 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3526 byte offsets are specified.
3529 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3532 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3535 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3536 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3537 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3538 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3539 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3540 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3541 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3542 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3543 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3544 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3545 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3546 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3547 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3548 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3549 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3550 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3551 directory where M has write access.
3552 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3553 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3554 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3557 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3558 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3559 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3560 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3561 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3562 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3563 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3564 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3565 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3566 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3567 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3568 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3569 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3570 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3571 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3572 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3573 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3574 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3575 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3576 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3577 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3578 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3579 appeared one additional time.
3581 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3582 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3583 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3584 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3587 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3588 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3589 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3590 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3591 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3592 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3593 if there were more than 338.
3595 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3596 - false --help now exits nonzero
3599 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3600 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3601 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3602 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3605 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3606 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3607 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3608 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3609 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3612 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3613 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3614 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3615 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3616 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3617 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3618 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3621 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3622 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3623 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3624 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3625 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3626 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3628 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3629 under certain unusual conditions
3630 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3631 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3634 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3635 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3636 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3637 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3638 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3639 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3640 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3641 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3642 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3643 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3644 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3645 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3646 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3647 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3648 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3649 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3652 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3653 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3656 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3657 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3658 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3659 involving hard-linked directories
3660 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3661 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3662 character-special and block files
3665 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3666 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3667 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3668 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3669 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3670 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3671 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3672 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3673 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3675 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3676 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3677 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3678 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3679 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3680 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3681 specified on the command line.
3682 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3683 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3684 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3685 the first file untouched.
3686 * readlink: new program
3687 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3688 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3689 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3690 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3691 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3692 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3695 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3696 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3697 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3698 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3699 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3700 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3701 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3702 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3703 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3704 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3705 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3706 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3708 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3709 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3710 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3712 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3713 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3714 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3715 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3716 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3717 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3718 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3719 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3722 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3723 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3726 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3727 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3728 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3729 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3730 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3731 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3732 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3735 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3736 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3738 ========================================================================
3739 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3740 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3743 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3745 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3746 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3747 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3748 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3749 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3750 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3751 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3752 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3753 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3754 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3755 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3756 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3758 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3759 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3760 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3761 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3763 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3766 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3768 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3769 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3770 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3771 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3772 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3773 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3774 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3777 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3778 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3779 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3780 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3781 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3782 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3783 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3784 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3785 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3786 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3787 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3788 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3789 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3790 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3791 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3792 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3794 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3795 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3797 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3798 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3799 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3800 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3801 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3802 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3804 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3805 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3806 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3807 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3808 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3809 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3810 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3812 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3813 the source files in the following example:
3814 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3815 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3816 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3817 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3818 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3819 links between source files with --preserve=links
3820 * cp accepts new options:
3821 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3822 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3823 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3824 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3825 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3826 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3827 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3828 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3829 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3831 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3832 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3833 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3834 even though it's older than dest.
3835 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3836 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3837 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3838 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3839 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3841 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3842 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3843 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3844 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3845 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3846 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3847 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3849 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3850 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3851 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3853 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3854 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3855 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3856 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3857 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3858 This is the default.
3860 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3861 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3862 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3863 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3864 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3866 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3869 ========================================================================
3870 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3871 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3874 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3875 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3877 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3878 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3879 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3880 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3881 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3883 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3884 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3885 that specifies a non-directory
3888 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3889 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3890 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3891 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3892 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3893 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3894 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3895 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3896 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3897 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3898 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3899 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3900 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3901 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3902 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3903 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3904 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3905 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3906 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3907 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3908 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3909 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3910 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3911 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3913 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3914 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3915 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3917 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3919 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3920 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3922 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3923 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3924 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3925 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3926 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3928 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3929 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3930 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3931 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3932 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3934 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3936 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3937 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3938 * still more portability fixes
3939 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3940 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3942 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3944 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3946 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3948 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3949 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3950 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3951 there is any time remaining
3952 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3954 ========================================================================
3955 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3956 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3958 This package began as the union of the following:
3959 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3961 ========================================================================
3963 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3965 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3966 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3967 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3968 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3969 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3970 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.