1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
8 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
9 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
10 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
12 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
13 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
14 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
15 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
16 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
18 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
19 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
20 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
21 now fails instead of losing the data.
22 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
24 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
25 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
26 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
28 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
29 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
32 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
33 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
34 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
36 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
37 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
38 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
40 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
41 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
42 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
44 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
45 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
46 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
48 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
49 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
50 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
52 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
53 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
56 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
59 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
60 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
61 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
63 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
64 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
66 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
67 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
68 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
69 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
71 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
72 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
73 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
75 runcon now disables use of the TIOCSTI ioctl in its children, which could
76 be used to inject commands to the terminal and run at the original context.
77 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
79 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
80 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
81 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
83 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
84 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
88 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
89 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
90 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
92 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
93 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
95 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
96 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
98 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
99 executing the subsidiary program.
101 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
105 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
107 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped
108 and the reader of the pipe terminates.
110 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
111 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
112 is effective in this case.
115 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
119 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
120 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
121 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
123 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
124 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
125 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
127 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
128 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
129 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
131 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
132 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
133 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
135 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
136 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
137 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
139 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
140 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
141 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
142 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
143 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
145 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
146 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
147 depending on the size of the first file processed.
148 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
152 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
153 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
154 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
155 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
157 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
158 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
159 time zone is indeterminate.
161 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
162 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
163 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
164 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
166 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
167 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
168 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
170 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
171 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
173 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
174 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
175 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
179 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
180 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
181 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
184 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
188 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
189 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
192 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
193 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
194 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
196 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
197 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
198 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
199 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
200 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
202 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
203 System V style platforms where this information is available only
204 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
206 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
209 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
210 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
211 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
213 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
214 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
215 defaults to a different SELinux context.
217 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
218 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
220 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
221 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
222 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
224 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
225 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
227 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
228 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
229 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
231 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
233 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
234 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
236 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
237 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
239 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
240 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
242 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
245 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
246 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
247 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
248 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
250 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
251 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
252 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
254 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
255 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
256 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
258 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
259 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
260 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
262 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
263 only doing so if --retry is specified.
264 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
266 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
269 ** Changes in behavior
271 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
273 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
274 values for any argument.
276 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
277 they are out of localtime range.
279 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
280 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
281 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
282 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
286 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
287 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
288 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
290 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
291 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
293 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
294 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
296 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
298 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
299 written to a terminal.
301 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
302 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
304 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
305 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
306 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
307 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
308 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
309 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
310 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
311 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
312 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
313 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
314 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
316 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
317 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
321 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
322 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
326 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
328 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
329 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
331 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
334 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
338 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
339 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
340 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
341 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
343 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
346 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
347 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
348 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
350 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
353 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
354 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
355 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
357 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
358 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
360 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
361 that specify an offset for the first field.
362 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
364 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
365 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
369 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
370 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
374 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
375 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
377 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
378 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
379 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
380 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
381 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
383 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
384 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
385 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
387 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
388 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
389 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
391 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
392 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
394 ** Changes in behavior
396 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
397 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
399 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
400 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
402 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
403 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
405 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
406 when outputting to a terminal.
408 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
412 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
413 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
415 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
416 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
418 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
419 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
420 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
422 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
423 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
425 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
426 upon detection of a directory cycle.
427 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
429 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
431 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
432 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
433 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
435 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
436 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
439 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
443 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
444 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
446 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
447 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
449 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
450 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
451 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
453 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
454 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
455 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
456 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
458 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
459 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
460 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
461 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
463 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
464 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
466 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
467 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
469 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
470 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
471 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
473 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
474 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
475 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
477 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
478 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
479 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
481 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
482 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
483 character at the 4GiB position.
484 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
486 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
487 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
489 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
490 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
492 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
493 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
494 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
496 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
499 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
500 replaced before inotify watches were created.
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
503 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
504 [bug introduced in the beginning]
506 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
507 when those files are being created or renamed.
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
512 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
513 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
514 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
515 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
517 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
518 on stderr approximately every second.
520 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
521 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
523 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
524 other than the default newline character.
526 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
527 a useful setting with high latency links.
529 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
530 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
532 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
533 and output errors in general.
535 ** Changes in behavior
537 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
538 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
539 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
540 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
542 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
543 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
544 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
545 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
546 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
548 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
549 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
551 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
553 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
554 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
556 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
557 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
561 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
562 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
564 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
565 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
567 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
568 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
570 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
571 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
573 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
575 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
576 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
577 documentation are provided.
580 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
584 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
585 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
587 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
588 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
589 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
590 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
592 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
593 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
594 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
595 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
597 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
598 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
600 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
601 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
603 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
604 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
605 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
606 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
607 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
608 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
622 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
624 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
625 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
626 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
627 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
628 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
629 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
631 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
632 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
633 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
636 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
637 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
638 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
640 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
641 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
642 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
645 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
646 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
647 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
649 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
650 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
651 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
653 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
654 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
655 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
656 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
659 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
660 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
663 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
664 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
666 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
667 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
668 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
670 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
671 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
673 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
674 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
676 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
677 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
679 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
680 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
682 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
683 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
684 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
686 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
687 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
691 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
692 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
694 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
695 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
696 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
697 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
698 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
699 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
700 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
701 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
702 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
703 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
704 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
705 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
706 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
707 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
708 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
709 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
710 it suitable for embedded system.
712 ** Changes in behavior
714 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
715 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
717 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
718 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
720 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
721 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
722 will result in the delayed output of lines.
724 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
725 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
726 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
730 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
731 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
732 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
734 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
736 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
737 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
738 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
740 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
741 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
742 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
743 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
745 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
746 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
748 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
749 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
750 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
753 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
757 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
758 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
759 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
761 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
762 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
763 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
764 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
766 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
767 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
768 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
770 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
771 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
773 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
775 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
776 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
777 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
779 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
780 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
781 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
783 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
784 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
785 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
786 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
788 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
789 from the source, when copying across file systems.
790 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
792 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
793 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
794 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
796 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
797 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
799 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
800 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
801 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
802 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
804 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
805 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
806 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
808 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
809 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
810 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
814 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
815 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
816 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
818 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
819 used to identify the split points.
821 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
822 command line argument through to the output.
824 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
827 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
828 a NUL instead of a white space character.
830 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
831 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
833 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
835 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
836 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
837 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
839 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
840 unique groups with empty lines.
842 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
843 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
845 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
848 ** Changes in behavior
850 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
851 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
852 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
853 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
855 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
856 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
858 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
859 not just the transfer counts.
861 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
863 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
864 as per the documented interface.
868 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
870 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
871 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
872 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
873 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
875 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
876 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
877 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
878 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
880 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
881 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
882 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
884 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
885 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
887 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
888 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
890 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
894 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
897 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
901 numfmt: reformat numbers
905 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
906 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
907 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
909 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
910 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
911 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
913 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
914 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
918 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
919 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
921 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
922 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
923 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
925 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
926 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
927 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
929 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
930 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
931 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
933 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
934 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
935 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
937 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
938 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
939 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
941 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
942 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
944 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
945 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
947 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
948 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
949 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
951 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
952 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
953 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
955 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
956 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
957 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
959 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
960 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
961 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
962 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
964 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
965 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
966 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
968 ** Changes in behavior
970 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
971 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
972 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
973 'total' in the target column.
975 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
976 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
977 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
979 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
980 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
982 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
983 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
987 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
988 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
990 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
991 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
993 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
997 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
998 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
999 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1000 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1001 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1002 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1003 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1004 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1005 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1006 for a patched distribution package.
1008 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1009 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1011 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1012 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1013 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1014 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1017 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1021 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1023 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1024 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1025 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1029 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1030 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1031 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1032 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1035 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1036 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1038 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1039 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1040 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1041 eventually exits nonzero.
1043 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1044 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1045 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1046 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1047 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1049 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1050 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1051 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1053 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1054 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1055 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1057 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1058 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1059 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1061 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1062 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1063 Before, this would infloop:
1064 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1065 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1067 ** Changes in behavior
1069 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1073 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1074 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1075 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1076 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1077 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1080 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1081 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1082 format-changing options.
1084 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1085 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1086 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1087 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1088 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1092 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1093 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1094 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1095 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1096 are run without following the instructions in README.
1098 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1099 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1100 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1101 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1102 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1103 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1104 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1107 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1111 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1112 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1113 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1114 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1116 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1117 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1118 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1119 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1121 sort -u could read freed memory.
1122 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1123 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1124 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1128 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1129 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1130 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1131 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1134 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1138 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1139 processes will not intersperse their output.
1140 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1142 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1143 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1144 date: invalid date '\260'
1145 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1147 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1148 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1149 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1150 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1152 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1153 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1154 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1156 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1157 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1158 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1159 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1160 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1161 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1163 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1164 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1166 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1167 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1169 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1170 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1171 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1173 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1174 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1175 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1179 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1181 ** Changes in behavior
1183 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1184 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1185 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1186 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1187 have any reason to include it here.
1191 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1192 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1193 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1195 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1196 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1197 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1200 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1204 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1205 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1206 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1207 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1208 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1209 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1211 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1212 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1213 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1214 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1215 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1216 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1217 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1219 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1222 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1223 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1227 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1228 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1230 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1232 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1234 ** Changes in behavior
1236 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1237 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1238 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1240 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1241 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1244 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1248 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1249 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1250 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1251 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1252 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1253 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1254 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1255 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1257 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1258 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1259 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1260 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1261 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1263 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1264 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1266 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1267 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1269 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1270 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1272 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1273 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1275 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1276 additional static suffix to output file names.
1278 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1279 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1280 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1282 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1283 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1287 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1288 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1289 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1291 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1292 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1293 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1294 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1295 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1296 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1298 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1299 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1300 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1301 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1302 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1304 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1305 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1306 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1307 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1311 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1312 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1313 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1315 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1316 instead of causing a usage failure.
1318 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1321 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1325 realpath: print resolved file names.
1329 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1330 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1332 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1333 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1335 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1336 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1337 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1338 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1339 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1340 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1342 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1343 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1344 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1346 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1347 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1348 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1350 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1351 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1352 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1353 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1354 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1356 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1358 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1359 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1361 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1362 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1363 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1365 ** Changes in behavior
1367 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1368 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1369 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1370 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1371 usually-short referent instead.
1373 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1374 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1375 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1376 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1379 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1383 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1384 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1385 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1387 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1390 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1391 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1395 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1396 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1398 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1399 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1400 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1401 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1403 ** Changes in behavior
1405 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1406 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1407 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1411 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1412 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1413 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1416 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1420 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1421 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1422 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1424 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1425 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1427 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1428 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1429 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1430 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1431 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1433 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1434 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1435 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1436 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1437 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1438 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1439 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1440 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1442 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1443 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1445 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1446 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1448 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1449 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1451 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1452 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1453 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1455 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1456 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1457 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1458 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1460 ** Changes in behavior
1462 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1463 when -v or -c specified.
1465 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1466 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1470 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1471 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1472 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1473 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1474 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1476 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1477 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1478 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1480 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1481 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1482 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1483 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1484 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1485 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1486 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1488 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1489 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1490 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1494 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1495 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1497 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1500 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1501 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1503 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1504 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1506 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1507 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1509 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1511 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1515 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1516 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1518 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1521 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1525 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1526 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1528 ** Changes in behavior
1530 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1531 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1532 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1533 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1534 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1535 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1536 resolved for 2.6.39.
1537 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1538 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1539 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1543 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1546 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1550 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1551 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1552 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1554 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1555 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1556 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1558 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1559 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1560 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1562 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1563 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1565 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1566 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1568 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1569 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1571 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1572 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1576 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1577 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1578 processed portion thereof.
1580 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1581 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1583 ** Changes in behavior
1585 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1586 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1587 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1589 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1590 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1591 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1593 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1594 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1596 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1597 Use --preserve-context instead.
1599 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1602 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1606 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1607 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1608 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1609 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1610 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1612 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1613 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1615 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1616 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1617 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1619 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1620 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1622 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1623 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1627 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1628 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1629 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1630 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1631 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1632 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1633 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1634 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1636 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1637 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1638 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1640 ** Changes in behavior
1642 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1643 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1644 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1647 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1651 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1652 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1653 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1656 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1660 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1661 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1663 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1664 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1666 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1667 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1669 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1670 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1671 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1672 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1674 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1675 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1677 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1678 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1679 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1681 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1683 ** Changes in behavior
1685 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1686 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1687 to the number of available processors.
1691 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1694 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1698 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1699 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1700 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1701 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1703 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1704 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1705 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1707 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1708 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1710 ** Changes in behavior
1712 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1713 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1715 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1716 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1717 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1718 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1719 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1720 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1722 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1723 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1724 the same way as the others.
1726 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1727 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1730 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1734 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1735 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1736 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1738 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1739 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1741 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1742 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1743 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1745 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1746 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1748 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1749 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1751 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1752 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1753 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1755 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1756 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1757 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1758 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1762 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1763 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1765 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1768 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1769 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1771 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1773 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1774 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1775 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1777 ** Changes in behavior
1779 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1780 rather than its aliased target.
1782 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1783 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1784 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1786 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1787 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1788 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1789 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1790 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1791 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1792 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1793 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1795 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1797 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1799 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1800 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1803 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1804 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1805 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1806 control like taskset for example.
1808 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1810 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1811 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1812 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1813 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1814 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1815 includes %C when context information is available.
1817 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1818 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1819 rather than a file system attribute.
1821 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1822 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1823 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1824 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1826 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1827 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1828 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1830 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1831 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1832 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1835 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1839 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1840 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1842 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1844 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1845 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1847 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1848 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1849 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1850 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1852 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1853 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1854 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1858 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1859 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1861 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1862 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1863 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1865 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1866 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1867 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1868 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1869 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1870 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1871 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1872 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1873 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1875 ** Changes in behavior
1877 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1878 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1880 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1881 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1884 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1888 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1889 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1890 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1891 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1895 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1896 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1898 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1899 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1900 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1901 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1903 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1904 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1905 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1908 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1912 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1913 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1914 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1916 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1917 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1918 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1920 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1921 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1923 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1924 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1925 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1926 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1928 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1929 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1930 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1932 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1933 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1934 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1935 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1937 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1938 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1939 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1941 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1942 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1943 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1944 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1946 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1947 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1948 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1950 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1951 processes will not intersperse their output.
1952 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1955 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1959 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1960 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1962 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1963 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1965 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1966 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1967 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1968 the presence of the empty string argument.
1969 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1971 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1972 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1973 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1974 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1976 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1977 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1979 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1980 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1981 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1983 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1984 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1985 and with a malicious user on the same system
1986 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1987 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1990 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1994 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1995 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1998 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1999 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2000 offending directory and all "contents."
2002 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2003 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2004 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2006 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2007 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2008 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2010 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2011 processes will not intersperse their output.
2012 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2013 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2015 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2016 output the name of the file to stdout.
2017 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2019 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2020 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2021 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2023 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2024 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2027 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2028 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2029 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2031 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2032 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2033 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2034 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2035 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2036 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2038 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2039 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2040 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2041 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2043 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2044 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2046 ** Changes in behavior
2048 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2049 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2050 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2051 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2052 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2054 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2055 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2056 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2057 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2059 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2061 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2062 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2063 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2064 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2065 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2069 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2073 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2074 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2076 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2077 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2079 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2080 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2081 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2083 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2084 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2087 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2091 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2092 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2093 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2095 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2096 to accommodate leap seconds.
2097 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2099 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2100 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2101 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2103 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2105 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2106 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2107 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2109 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2110 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2111 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2112 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2113 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2117 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2118 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2119 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2120 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2122 ** Changes in behavior
2124 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2125 environment variable is set.
2127 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2128 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2129 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2133 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2134 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2135 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2136 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2138 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2139 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2140 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2141 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2145 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2146 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2147 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2149 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2150 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2151 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2152 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2153 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2154 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2155 another improvement:
2157 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2158 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2161 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2165 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2166 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2167 and libraries tested at configure time.
2168 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2170 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2171 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2173 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2174 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2176 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2177 printing a summary to stderr.
2178 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2180 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2181 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2182 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2184 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2185 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2187 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2188 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2189 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2190 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2192 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2193 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2194 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2195 which is relatively unusual.
2196 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2198 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2199 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2200 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2201 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2202 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2203 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2204 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2208 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2209 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2210 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2211 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2212 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2216 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2217 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2219 ** Changes in behavior
2221 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2222 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2223 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2224 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2225 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2228 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2232 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2233 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2235 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2236 before data copying has started.
2238 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2239 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2241 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2242 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2243 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2244 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2246 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2247 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2248 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2249 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2251 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2256 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2257 for its standard streams.
2259 ** Changes in behavior
2261 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2262 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2263 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2264 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2265 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2266 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2268 ** Deprecated options
2270 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2271 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2275 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2277 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2278 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2279 a btrfs file system.
2281 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2283 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2284 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2286 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2287 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2290 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2294 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2295 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2296 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2297 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2299 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2300 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2301 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2302 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2303 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2308 make check: two tests have been corrected
2312 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2313 inherited from gnulib.
2316 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2320 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2321 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2322 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2323 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2325 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2326 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2328 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2330 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2331 systems without xattr support.
2333 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2334 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2335 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2337 ** Changes in behavior
2339 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2340 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2341 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2342 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2344 ** Improved robustness
2346 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2347 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2348 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2349 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2350 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2351 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2352 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2353 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2354 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2358 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2359 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2361 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2362 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2363 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2364 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2365 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2368 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2372 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2373 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2374 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2378 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2379 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2380 data was read, or on process exit.
2381 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2383 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2384 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2385 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2386 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2388 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2389 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2390 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2391 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2393 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2394 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2396 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2397 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2399 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2400 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2401 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2403 ** Changes in behavior
2405 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2406 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2407 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2409 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2410 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2412 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2413 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2414 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2417 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2421 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2423 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2424 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2425 install: Never copies xattrs
2427 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2428 from overwriting any existing destination file
2430 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2431 mode where this feature is available.
2433 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2434 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2435 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2436 do not modify the destination at all.
2438 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2440 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2444 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2445 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2447 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2449 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2450 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2452 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2453 processing the first file name
2455 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2456 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2457 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2458 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2460 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2461 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2463 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2464 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2467 ** Changes in behavior
2469 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2470 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2472 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2473 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2474 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2476 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2477 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2479 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2481 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2482 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2483 is still marked with a '+'.
2486 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2490 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2491 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2495 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2496 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2497 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2498 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2499 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2500 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2502 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2503 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2505 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2506 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2508 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2510 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2511 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2512 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2514 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2515 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2517 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2518 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2519 used to factor large numbers.
2521 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2524 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2526 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2528 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2529 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2531 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2532 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2533 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2534 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2536 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2537 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2538 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2540 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2541 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2545 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2547 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2548 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2550 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2551 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2553 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2555 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2556 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2560 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2561 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2562 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2564 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2566 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2567 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2568 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2570 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2571 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2572 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2574 ** Changes in behavior
2576 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2577 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2580 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2584 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2585 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2586 'futimens' system calls.
2590 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2592 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2593 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2594 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2596 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2597 with no USERNAME argument.
2599 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2600 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2601 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2603 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2604 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2605 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2606 number of fields for some inputs.
2608 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2609 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2611 ** Changes in behavior
2613 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2614 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2617 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2621 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2623 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2624 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2625 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2626 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2628 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2629 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2631 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2632 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2634 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2635 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2637 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2638 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2639 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2640 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2642 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2643 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2644 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2645 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2646 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2647 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2649 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2650 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2652 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2653 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2654 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2656 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2657 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2659 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2660 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2662 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2663 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2664 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2665 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2667 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2668 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2670 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2671 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2673 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2674 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2675 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2679 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2680 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2682 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2683 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2684 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2685 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2689 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2690 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2692 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2694 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2698 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2699 which have negative errno values.
2703 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2707 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2711 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2712 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2715 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2719 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2720 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2721 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2723 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2724 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2725 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2726 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2730 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2731 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2732 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2733 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2736 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2740 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2742 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2743 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2744 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2747 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2751 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2752 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2754 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2756 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2758 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2760 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2764 ** Changes in behavior
2766 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2767 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2769 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2770 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2772 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2773 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2774 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2778 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2779 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2780 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2781 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2782 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2783 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2784 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2785 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2786 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2787 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2788 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2790 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2791 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2792 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2795 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2798 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2799 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2800 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2802 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2803 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2804 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2807 ** New build options
2809 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2810 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2811 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2812 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2814 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2815 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2816 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2817 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2818 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2819 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2820 of "make check" fail.
2822 ** Remove deprecated options
2824 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2825 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2826 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2827 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2828 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2830 ** Improved robustness
2832 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2833 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2834 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2835 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2836 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2837 loss of the contents of a/f.
2839 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2840 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2844 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2845 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2846 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2848 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2849 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2850 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2851 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2853 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2854 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2855 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2856 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2857 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2858 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2859 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2860 destination is a symlink.
2862 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2864 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2865 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2867 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2868 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2870 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2872 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2873 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2875 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2876 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2878 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2881 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2882 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2884 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2885 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2887 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2888 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2889 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2890 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2892 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2893 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2894 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2896 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2897 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2898 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2900 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2901 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2902 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2903 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2905 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2906 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2907 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2909 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2910 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2912 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2913 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2915 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2917 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2918 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2919 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2921 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2922 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2924 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2925 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2927 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2928 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2930 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2931 [present in the original version]
2934 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2938 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2940 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2941 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2942 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2944 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2945 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2947 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2951 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2952 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2954 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2955 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2957 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2958 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2960 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2961 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2962 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2963 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2964 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2965 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2967 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2968 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2971 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2972 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2974 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2977 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2978 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2979 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2981 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2982 directory is unreadable.
2984 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2985 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2986 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2988 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2989 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2990 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2991 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2992 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2995 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2996 Before it would print nothing.
2998 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3000 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3001 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3002 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3003 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3004 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3005 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3006 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3007 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3009 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3013 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3014 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3015 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3017 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3018 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3019 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3020 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3023 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3027 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3028 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3029 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3030 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3031 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3032 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3033 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3035 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3036 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3037 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3038 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3039 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3040 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3041 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3042 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3044 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3045 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3046 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3049 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3053 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3054 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3056 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3057 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3058 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3060 ** Improved robustness
3062 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3063 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3064 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3067 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3071 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3072 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3073 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3074 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3075 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3077 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3081 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3084 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3088 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3089 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3090 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3091 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3093 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3094 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3096 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3097 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3098 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3101 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3103 ** Improved robustness
3105 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3106 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3108 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3109 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3110 or NFS-mounted partition.
3112 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3113 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3117 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3118 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3119 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3120 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3121 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3122 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3124 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3125 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3127 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3128 or neglect to report file removal.
3130 For the "groups" command:
3132 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3133 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3135 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3137 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3139 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3143 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3144 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3147 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3149 ** Changes in behavior
3151 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3152 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3153 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3154 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3156 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3157 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3158 a final './' or '../' component.
3160 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3161 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3162 this only for pipes.
3164 ** Infrastructure changes
3166 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3167 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3168 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3169 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3173 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3174 name is "." or "..".
3176 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3177 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3178 dirent.d_type support.
3180 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3181 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3183 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3184 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3185 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3186 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3189 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3191 ** Changes in behavior
3193 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3197 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3198 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3202 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3203 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3204 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3206 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3207 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3209 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3210 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3212 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3214 ** Improved robustness
3216 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3217 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3218 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3220 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3221 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3224 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3225 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3227 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3228 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3230 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3231 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3233 ** Changes in behavior
3235 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3236 where the two are distinct.
3238 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3239 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3240 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3241 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3242 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3243 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3244 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3245 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3246 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3247 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3248 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3249 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3250 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3251 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3252 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3253 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3254 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3256 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3257 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3258 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3260 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3261 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3262 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3263 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3266 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3267 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3271 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3272 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3273 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3274 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3276 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3277 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3278 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3280 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3281 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3282 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3283 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3284 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3287 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3288 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3290 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3291 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3292 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3293 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3295 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3296 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3297 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3299 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3300 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3301 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3302 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3304 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3305 and sticky) with the -m option.
3307 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3308 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3309 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3310 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3311 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3313 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3314 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3316 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3320 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3321 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3322 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3323 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3325 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3327 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3329 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3330 silently ignoring one of them.
3332 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3333 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3334 containing this change was 5.92.
3336 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3337 automatically newline terminated.
3339 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3340 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3341 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3342 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3345 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3346 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3347 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3350 ** Scheduled for removal
3352 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3353 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3355 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3356 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3357 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3358 command to unlink a directory.
3360 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3361 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3362 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3363 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3367 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3368 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3369 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3370 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3371 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3372 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3376 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3377 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3379 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3381 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3382 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3383 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3385 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3386 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3389 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3390 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3392 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3393 list directories before files.
3395 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3396 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3397 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3398 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3401 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3403 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3405 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3406 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3407 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3409 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3410 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3414 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3415 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3416 usually printing nothing.
3418 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3420 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3421 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3422 them with hard-linked directories.
3424 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3425 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3426 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3428 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3429 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3430 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3432 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3435 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3436 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3438 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3439 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3441 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3442 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3444 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3445 all command-line arguments.
3447 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3449 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3451 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3452 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3454 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3456 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3457 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3458 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3459 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3460 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3462 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3463 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3465 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3466 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3467 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3468 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3470 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3472 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3476 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3477 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3479 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3480 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3482 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3483 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3485 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3486 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3488 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3489 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3491 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3493 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3494 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3495 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3498 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3500 ** Build-related bug fixes
3502 installing .mo files would fail
3505 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3509 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3511 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3514 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3518 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3519 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3523 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3525 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3526 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3528 ** Deprecated options
3530 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3531 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3533 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3537 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3539 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3540 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3541 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3542 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3544 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3547 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3553 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3558 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3560 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3562 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3563 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3564 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3566 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3567 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3568 problematic usages. These include:
3570 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3571 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3572 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3573 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3574 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3575 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3576 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3577 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3578 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3580 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3581 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3583 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3584 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3585 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3586 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3588 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3589 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3590 between binary and text files.
3592 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3596 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3600 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3601 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3603 head tac tail tee tr
3604 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3606 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3607 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3609 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3610 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3611 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3613 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3615 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3617 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3618 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3619 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3623 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3625 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3626 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3628 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3629 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3630 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3634 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3635 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3639 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3640 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3641 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3645 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3646 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3650 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3652 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3654 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3658 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3659 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3660 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3662 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3663 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3664 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3665 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3666 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3668 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3672 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3673 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3674 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3676 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3678 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3679 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3680 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3681 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3683 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3685 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3686 rather than silently wrapping around.
3688 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3689 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3691 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3692 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3694 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3695 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3696 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3697 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3699 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3701 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3703 ** Improved robustness
3705 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3706 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3707 no matter how large the result.
3709 ** Improved portability
3711 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3712 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3714 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3716 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3717 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3718 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3720 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3721 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3725 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3726 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3728 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3730 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3731 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3732 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3733 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3735 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3736 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3738 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3739 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3740 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3742 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3744 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3745 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3747 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3748 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3750 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3752 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3753 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3755 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3756 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3758 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3759 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3760 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3762 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3764 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3766 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3770 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3772 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3773 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3774 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3776 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3777 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3779 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3780 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3781 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3783 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3784 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3786 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3787 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3788 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3789 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3791 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3792 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3794 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3795 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3796 the file system does not support it.
3798 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3800 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3801 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3803 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3805 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3806 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3808 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3809 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3810 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3811 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3813 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3814 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3817 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3818 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3819 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3820 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3822 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3823 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3824 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3825 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3827 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3828 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3830 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3832 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3833 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3834 reporting incorrect results.
3838 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3839 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3841 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3844 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3846 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3847 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3849 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3850 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3852 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3855 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3856 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3857 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3858 the file name does not look like a page range.
3860 printf has several changes:
3862 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3863 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3865 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3866 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3867 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3869 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3870 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3873 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3874 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3876 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3877 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3879 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3881 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3882 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3884 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3886 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3888 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3889 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3890 when first encountering the directory.
3894 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3895 output; POSIX requires this.
3897 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3898 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3900 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3902 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3903 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3905 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3906 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3908 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3909 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3910 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3911 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3912 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3913 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3914 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3916 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3917 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3918 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3920 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3921 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3923 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3925 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3927 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3928 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3929 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3930 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3932 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3936 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3937 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3938 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3939 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3940 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3942 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3943 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3944 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3946 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3947 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3949 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3950 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3952 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3953 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
3954 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
3955 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3956 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
3958 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3959 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3961 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3962 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3964 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3966 nocreat do not create the output file
3967 excl fail if the output file already exists
3968 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3969 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3971 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3973 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3974 direct use direct I/O for data
3975 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3976 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3977 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3978 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3979 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3981 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3983 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3984 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3987 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3988 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3989 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3990 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3991 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3992 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3994 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3995 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3997 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4000 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4002 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4004 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4005 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4007 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4008 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4009 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4011 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4012 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4013 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4015 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4017 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4018 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4020 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4021 for compatibility with bash.
4023 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4025 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4026 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4027 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4028 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4030 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4031 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4033 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4034 ls supports TABSIZE.
4035 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4036 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4037 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4039 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4042 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4044 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4045 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4046 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4047 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4048 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4049 an offset, not as a file name.
4051 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4052 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4054 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4055 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4057 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4058 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4060 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4061 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4062 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4064 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4065 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4067 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4068 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4072 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4074 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4076 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4080 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4081 or more arguments between partitions.
4083 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4084 holes in the destination.
4086 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4087 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4088 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4089 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4090 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4091 terminates immediately.
4093 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4095 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4097 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4098 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4099 not the empty string.
4101 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4102 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4106 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4107 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4108 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4111 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4118 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4122 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4123 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4125 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4126 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4128 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4129 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4130 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4133 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4137 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4138 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4140 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4141 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4143 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4144 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4145 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4147 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4149 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4152 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4154 ** Configuration option
4156 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4157 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4161 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4162 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4166 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4167 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4168 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4171 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4172 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4173 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4174 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4175 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4176 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4177 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4180 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4184 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4185 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4186 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4188 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4189 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4191 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4193 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4194 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4195 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4196 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4198 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4200 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4201 not just the ones that reference directories
4203 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4204 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4206 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4207 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4208 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4210 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4211 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4212 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4213 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4214 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4215 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4217 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4222 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4223 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4225 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4227 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4229 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4231 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4232 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4234 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4235 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4237 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4239 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4243 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4245 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4247 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4248 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4249 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4250 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4251 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4253 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4254 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4256 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4257 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4259 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4260 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4262 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4263 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4264 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4268 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4269 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4270 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4271 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4272 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4273 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4274 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4275 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4276 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4277 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4278 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4279 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4280 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4281 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4283 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4285 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4286 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4288 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4290 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4292 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4293 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4295 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4297 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4298 without a trailing newline.
4300 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4301 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4303 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4306 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4310 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4312 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4314 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4315 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4316 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4317 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4319 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4321 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4322 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4323 be printed without leading spaces.
4325 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4326 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4331 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4332 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4333 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4335 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4337 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4338 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4340 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4341 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4343 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4344 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4346 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4348 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4350 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4352 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4353 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4355 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4357 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4359 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4360 byte offsets are specified.
4363 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4366 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4369 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4370 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4371 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4372 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4373 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4374 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4375 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4376 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4377 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4378 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4379 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4380 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4381 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4382 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4383 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4384 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4385 directory where M has write access.
4386 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4387 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4388 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4391 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4392 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4393 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4394 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4395 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4396 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4397 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4398 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4399 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4400 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4401 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4402 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4403 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4404 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4405 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4406 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4407 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4408 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4409 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4410 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4411 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4412 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4413 appeared one additional time.
4415 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4416 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4417 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4418 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4421 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4422 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4423 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4424 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4425 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4426 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4427 if there were more than 338.
4429 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4430 - false --help now exits nonzero
4433 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4434 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4435 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4436 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4439 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4440 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4441 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4442 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4443 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4446 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4447 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4448 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4449 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4450 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4451 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4452 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4455 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4456 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4457 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4458 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4459 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4460 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4462 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4463 under certain unusual conditions
4464 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4465 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4468 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4469 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4470 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4471 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4472 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4473 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4474 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4475 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4476 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4477 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4478 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4479 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4480 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4481 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4482 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4483 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4486 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4487 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4490 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4491 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4492 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4493 involving hard-linked directories
4494 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4495 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4496 character-special and block files
4499 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4500 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4501 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4502 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4503 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4504 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4505 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4506 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4507 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4509 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4510 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4511 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4512 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4513 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4514 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4515 specified on the command line.
4516 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4517 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4518 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4519 the first file untouched.
4520 * readlink: new program
4521 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4522 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4523 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4524 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4525 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4526 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4529 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4530 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4531 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4532 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4533 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4534 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4535 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4536 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4537 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4538 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4539 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4540 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4542 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4543 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4544 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4546 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4547 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4548 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4549 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4550 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4551 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4552 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4553 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4556 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4557 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4560 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4561 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4562 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4563 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4564 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4565 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4566 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4569 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4570 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4572 ========================================================================
4573 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4574 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4577 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4579 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4580 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4581 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4582 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4583 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4584 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4585 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4586 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4587 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4588 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4589 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4590 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4592 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4593 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4594 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4595 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4597 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4600 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4602 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4603 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4604 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4605 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4606 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4607 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4608 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4611 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4612 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4613 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4614 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4615 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4616 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4617 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4618 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4619 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4620 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4621 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4622 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4623 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4624 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4625 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4626 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4628 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4629 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4631 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4632 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4633 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4634 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4635 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4636 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4638 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4639 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4640 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4641 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4642 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4643 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4644 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4646 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4647 the source files in the following example:
4648 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4649 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4650 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4651 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4652 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4653 links between source files with --preserve=links
4654 * cp accepts new options:
4655 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4656 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4657 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4658 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4659 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4660 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4661 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4662 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4663 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4665 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4666 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4667 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4668 even though it's older than dest.
4669 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4670 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4671 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4672 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4673 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4675 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4676 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4677 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4678 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4679 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4680 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4681 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4683 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4684 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4685 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4687 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4688 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4689 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4690 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4691 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4692 This is the default.
4694 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4695 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4696 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4697 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4698 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4700 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4703 ========================================================================
4704 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4705 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4708 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4709 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4711 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4712 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4713 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4714 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4715 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4717 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4718 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4719 that specifies a non-directory
4722 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4723 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4724 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4725 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4726 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4727 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4728 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4729 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4730 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4731 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4732 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4733 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4734 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4735 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4736 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4737 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4738 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4739 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4740 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4741 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4742 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4743 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4744 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4745 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4747 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4748 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4749 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4751 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4753 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4754 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4756 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4757 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4758 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4759 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4760 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4762 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4763 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4764 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4765 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4766 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4768 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4770 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4771 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4772 * still more portability fixes
4773 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4774 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4776 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4778 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4780 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4782 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4783 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4784 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4785 there is any time remaining
4786 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4788 ========================================================================
4789 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4790 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4792 This package began as the union of the following:
4793 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4795 ========================================================================
4797 Copyright (C) 2001-2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4799 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4800 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4801 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4802 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4803 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4804 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.